Barron's Streetwise - 10% Market Dip? How Not to React

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Jack walks through ways to hedge market downside from foolish to sensible. Plus, we talk to Barry Ritholtz about strategies from his new book, How Not To Invest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With record levels of dry powder available for investment, find out what's in store for private markets in 2025 and beyond. Listen to Crafting Capital in partnership with UBS at partners.wsj.com slash UBS, Spotify and Apple podcasts. I had read this quote of of all people, Charlie Munger. Someone asked him, are you and Warren Buffett so successful because you're so much smarter than everybody else and classic mongerism. He said, we're not smarter than everybody else. We're just less stupid. Hello and welcome to the Baron streetwise podcast. I'm Jack Howe.

And the voice you just heard is Barry Ritholtz. He's the chief investment officer of Ritholtz wealth management He's also an author. He's talking about his new book. It's called how not to invest. We'll talk to him in a minute First we'll say a few words about hedging your downside in US stocks There are a couple of sensible ways to do that and a bunch of horrible ones. We'll run through them. Listening in is our audio producer, Alexis Moore. Hi, Lexus. Hello, Jack.

We're going to hear from our friend Jackson Cantrell at the end of this episode, as we said last week, Jackson is leaving us. We're sad to see him go. We're happy to have you aboard. is leaving us. We're sad to see him go. We're happy to have you aboard. I also wrote for Barron's this week about some choices for people who want to hedge against a drop in the US stock market. The market is already dropping. Last I saw the S&P 500 was down 8% from its late January peak. It's no big whoop, right? If you've held over the past decade, you've still made 215%. But you might be wondering, is this just a wobble or is it a warning about something bigger?

And as I've said before, there's no way to really tell. That's the deal with stocks. You get better long-term returns than in anything else. Since 1900, the U.S. market has returned 9.7% annualized. That's a lot more than bonds at 4.6% or bills at 3.4% or inflation at 2.9%. But you can get a sudden sharp drawdown. 20%, maybe 50%. It can strike without warning. It could take a few years to bounce back or it could take more than a decade. It's not even easy to say what exactly is driving stock prices down recently.

I've heard people talking about President Trump having a quick trigger finger on tariffs and that has investors second-guessing their assumption that he's going to go cautiously on matters that might upset the stock market. That sounds plausible, but at the same time, Japan in January raised its interest rates for the first time in a decade. That has deprived big traders of one of their favorite sources of cheap borrowing for buying U.S. tech shares. So maybe it's Japanese interest rates, or maybe the U.S. stock market just looks a little pricey Deutsche Bank argues in a recent note that there are some resemblances now with

2000 which was the end of the dot-com stock bubble back then tech stocks fell but defensive sectors were climbing and the S&P 500 finished the year 2000 down just 12%. Not bad. But then the bearishness broadened and the next two years brought drops of 13% and 24%. Ouch. Then again, I've heard a lot of crash warnings over the past decade,

and there's even been an actual crash during the COVID-19 pandemic. You're still up a lot. So I wouldn't dump stocks wholesale. If you're nervous, consider some ways to hedge your risk of a crash and some ways not to. Definitely don't buy an inverse exchange traded fund. You know the ones, Direction Daily S&P 500

bear 3X shares. Whatever the S&P 500 is doing, that'll give you a triple the opposite. It's for traders and definitely not long-term investors. First of all, stocks generally go up over time. So if you've heard about how compound interest is such a miracle, that basically puts that miracle to work against you.

It uses derivatives to bet against the stock market for one day at a time. So if you're using it to hedge for longer periods than a day, it's going to be imprecise. There are also high fees, almost a percentage point a year. That fund is up 16% so far this year. It sounds tempting. Anyone who was uninformed enough to hold that thing over the past decade,

there cannot possibly be people like that out there who've held that thing for a decade. I'm not laughing. If it's you, I'm sorry. You're down 99%. A fund like that uses periodic reverse splits to keep the share price from falling to pennies. Like I said, not a long-term holding,

not even a more than a couple hours holding, I would think. Most long-term investors just avoid things like that altogether. Last week, we talked about options and how it's so difficult to use them to hedge against declines in the stock market. So I'll skip that for now. Raising cash is another option I don't love. It's just very difficult to tell, like I said, when the stock market is going to decline. Since stocks are more likely to go up and down, you're likely to get the timing wrong.

Then you might feel stubborn and you might say, you're not wrong, you're just early. And then if stocks keep going up, next will be despair and capitulation and you'll buy back in and history suggests it'll be at a significantly higher price. Or you might get lucky and time the whole thing beautifully, but counting on luck is not a plan.

Now you can raise cash if you don't have enough already to meet your emergency needs. You can also do it if you're making a judgment on yields. If you say there's a certain percentage I want to have in bonds, but right now the yield curve is flat, so I'm not sacrificing too much term premium in bonds. If I hold that money in cash instead, if you're doing that kind of math and sure raise some extra cash, let me go quickly through a couple of more. It's tempting to say, I'll just buy safe stocks, but it's tough to tell which ones are safe.

There's a bedrock principle of modern investing that says that risk is directly related to returns. But what they don't tell you is that at the individual stock level, no one has really come up with a way to satisfactorily measure risk. Sometimes you look at a quote page online and you see a risk measure called beta, that's usually just based on a simple price regression that shows how volatile a stock has been in the past relative to the S&P 500. What you'd really like to know is how volatile it will be in

the future and beta can't tell you that. You got to be careful about buying reputational defensive stocks too. Package food makers are supposed to be defensive. They've been running up in price, but as we've talked about recently, big food is struggling with slipping revenues. Utilities are running up too. They're doing almost too well.

They're thriving amid demand for data center wattage. But a popular ETF of utilities is up about 21% over the past year, way more than the market. It's going for 18 times earnings. So you have to ask yourself, is it still defensively priced? You could buy an equal weight S&P 500 fund. There's a popular one with the ticker RSP.

Yes. Tell me more about equal weight because I feel like I've been hearing about that a lot, specifically because tech stocks are such a huge part of the S&P 500. Is that a good idea? I've got it kind of in the middle of the list, which means I'm kind of going from worst to best. So I don't think it's terrible, but I think you can do a little better. Here's why. There's always a skew in a portfolio like this. There's always a choice that you're making.

And I feel like this choice is a little weird and arbitrary. First of all, tech has been the thing that's done so well for you over the past decade. And isn't tech one of the most important parts of our lives right now? If you want an index that reflects the economic world around us, I'm not sure equal weight is it. For example, the equal weight index versus the regular index will have much more money in utilities and much less in communications.

Why? Because utilities are regulated at the state and local level, which means there are a lot of them. And telephone companies are just big. There's a few that do business nationally. But why should I hold more of an industry just because there's a high number of companies in that industry? It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think what people are looking at an equal weight S and P 500 index. What they're really saying is this thing has more of a value tilt than the regular S and P 500 right now, which is fine.

If a value tilt is what you want, they get yourself a value tilt, which brings me to my next item, value stocks. Look, here's a fund. It's called FTSE RAFI US 100 ETF. A lot of acronyms in there. The ticker on it is PRF. And that weights companies by, instead of their stock market value,

by a combination of the book value of their assets, their cash flow, their sales, and their dividends. In other words, by economic heft, not just stock market size. And that means that over time, it tends to tilt towards cheaper companies. It's done a little better than the equal weight S&P 500, both this year and over the past 10 years. So if you're considering equal weight, maybe buy this instead. By the way, there's a lively discussion to be had, I think, about whether value investing works

and is worth it. It kind of depends on what time period you look at. If you look at the longest series for which we have data about value investing, there are some indexes that go back to 1926. They say, yes, value investing does much better. Value stocks do much better than growth stocks

over that long time period. But if you go back to the early 1990s and you're looking at the S&P 500 growth versus S&P 500 value, growth versus S and P 500 value. Growth has done much better than value. Those pricey tech stocks have led the way. So for a 50 something year old, like myself, young fifties, mind you young fifties who, uh, entered the workforce in the early 1990s, pretty much the

whole of my investing life has involved growth stocks, leading value stocks. And yet I hear people talk about the fact that value is supposed to outperform over time. Okay. It makes sense in theory. I've just never seen it personally, but I'll take your word for it. If you're worried about the U S stock market being overweight in tech companies now, and you think the value is going to outperform at some point.

You can buy yourself a slice of something like PRF. I talked last week about overseas stocks. They haven't done well for 50 years relative to the US stock market, but I think they're they're doing well recently, right? Japan and Europe are outperforming the US so far this year. I think it makes sense to be broadly diversified overseas. If you wanna do that, go ahead and buy some ETFs like iShares MSCI Japan or iShares Core MSCI Europe.

If you're wondering how much, you can note that Japan is about 6% of the world's stock market and Europe is about twice that. That's a good place to start. And finally, the one thing on this list that I'm a believer in, even though the returns are not that exciting is bonds. You should have bonds.

The long-term returns are ho-hum, but as we said earlier, they're a little bit better than inflation. The real appeal with bonds is that they have low correlations with stocks, usually. Which means that they can provide cushioning when stocks crash. Not total immunity, mind, you're just cushioning.

And stocks have done so well for so long that if you have money in bonds, your bond allocation might be below where you want it. If it is, you can buy something like Schwab US aggregate bond ETF. That's cheap and diversified. Yields about 4.4% as an average duration of just under six years. If you want to dial in your bond mix, the fixed income strategist at Schwab recently recommended high-grade corporate bonds. Those yield 4.5 half percent to five and a half percent and treasury inflation protected securities or tips.

Some of those yield 2%. They also adjust for inflation going forward. The yield there for tips is near the high end of its 20-year range. And those are some ideas for people who want to hedge their downside in the event of a stock market crash, which we don't know whether we're getting anytime soon. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to hear from Barry Ritholtz about how not to invest. I love hearing about how not to do stuff.

I think I might enjoy it even more than how to do stuff. That's next after this quick break. Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle-free way to pay. But DC politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall Credit Card Bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money and you pay the price. Tell Congress to Guard Your Card because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at GuardYourCard.com.

Drag your friends. I thought you'd be dead by now. Get to the theater and experience the movie audiences are calling an adrenaline rush of a good time. It's a big screen blast. Kind of badass. I know, right? Nova Kane, now playing.

Welcome back, Alexis. Have you tried the poppy soda? Poppy? I haven't, you know, I, I'm not quite clear on what prebiotics are. I can't tell you what they are, but I can tell you what they, what they taste like. I mean, because my wife came home with some of this,

I tried it yesterday for the first time. It's like, it's like you have a soda, but when you weren't looking, somebody put like a couple of drops of vinegar in it, and then you taste it and you say, all right, it's soda, it's not bad. But then you say, wait a second, is something wrong with this? And then you have to keep taking sips to try to figure out

whether something, what's weird about it. And the only way to get the taste of the last sip out of your mouth is another sip. That's what that's like. I've switched to a different one now called Spindrift. That's a- Oh's a sparkling water. Yeah, it's it's seltzer with like the slightest rumor of fruit juice. It's I would I would hesitate to call it flavor.

You know what? It's pre flavored. It's it's the idea of a flavor. Yeah, I'm really in an experimental phase over here. Barry Riddles has nothing to do to my knowledge with prebiotic soda. He's the co-founder and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He's also the author of a new book called How Not to Invest.

I spoke with Barry recently about the book and some other stuff. Let's listen to part of that conversation now. I'm intrigued by the title of your book, and I'll tell you Barry recently about the book and some other stuff. Let's listen to part of that conversation now. I'm intrigued by the title of your book. And I'll tell you why I, I just, um, I dislike most things, most things that I hear about. I don't like. And so your book is called how not to invest. I feel like that's right up my alley.

Tell me about, you know, what was on your mind when you put this together? Sure. So first I didn't want to write this book. My last book was 15 years ago. It was a slog to write and a number of friends and a few publishers had been pushing me to do another book and I had come back from vacation in December, 2023, you have that sort of gap between Christmas and New Year. And I had come back from vacation in December, 2023. You have that sort of gap between Christmas and New Year,

so you have a little couple of days before you have to go back to work. And I just started sifting through a bunch of prior commentaries and research and the light kind of went off. And I found myself saying, like you, I really don't like a lot of things. And I spend a lot of time responding to clients and to the media and to other

people explaining why, no, that's a bad idea. No, you can't do that. And even if you could, you know, it's hard to tell what skill, what's luck. And you will mistake this randomness for actually having the ability to generate alpha. And the idea kind of forms in part due to Charlie Ellis's book, Winning the Loser's Game. But also, it was very serendipitous.

I had read this quote of all people, Charlie Munger. Someone asked him, are you and Warren Buffett so successful because you're so much smarter than everybody else? And classic Mungerism, he said, we're not smarter than everybody else. We're just less stupid. So the idea of inverting the whole how to book and tell people how not to sort of forms. And that was the genesis of this. I'm going to take your idea before you make it into a blockbuster series. I'm going to take your idea and just go, how not to drive, how not to parent. I mean, I don't, I can't tell you how to do everything, but I can tell

you how to not do some things. You know, that's the crazy thing is we think we win by scoring points. This was Charlie Ellis's lesson. Initially a short research paper in the 70s, and eventually it became the book, Winning the Losers Game. When you play tennis, you know, there's two games in one. There's the professional game and the amateur game.

The professionals win by scoring points. They hit with power, they hit with accuracy, they hit these drop shots. That's how the 0.01% of tennis players who are professionals win. The rest of us who are amateurs, we don't win that way. We lose imitating them. We're not Roger Federer, we're not Rafael Nadal. So we play outside of our ability. We double fault, we hit into the net, we hit wide, we hit long. And we sometimes grunt unnecessarily to every, you know, it's funny because you could tell when the U S open or, or Wimbledon or the Australian open happens because for about

10 days, all these amateurs are grunting thinking if only I grunt I'll get the ball in instead it's funny the the rest of the series how not to parent how not to drive if you've taken any of the high performance driving classes and everybody thinks they're taking a racing class they're really thinly disguised defensive driving classes. And it's all about don't exceed the parameters of the vehicle. Don't exceed your own skill level. Don't make these mistakes. Be less stupid and you'll be a much better driver. It's the same concept. I want to ask you about some things not to do as an investor, but before I do, you mentioned the term alpha a short while ago, and that for folks who don't know it's, it's kind of like a beating the market, whether you're beating the

market, is that something you should do or not do try to find alpha, try to beat the market, try to do something better or more than your, uh, stock index fund will do for you. You know, the book is filled with a lot of academic research and a million pages of foot notes. The data that comes from both the academic world and market professionals such as SPIVA is that when you look at the long-term performance of mutual fund managers or ETF managers in any given year,

less than half of them managed to beat the market net of fees. And when you expand that to any manager over a five-year period, it goes to about 83% of them fail to beat either the market or their benchmark. And you take that to 10 years and you're in the low 90%. And at 20 years, it virtually goes away. Other than a handful of names that are household names,

the Peter Lynch's, the Warren Buffets of the world, you know their names because they're unicorns. They're the rare people. So if you wanna pursue market beating returns, if you want to go after alpha, you should have an idea how difficult it is and the flip side of it is, and this comes from Howard Marx, you know, the problem with long-term track records is that they all suffer from a sequence of returns problem. And the managers that occasionally end in the top 10% will end up on other years in the bottom 10%.

And that's where the sequence of returns issue comes in. If you have a bottom 10%, which means you're probably down 10, 20% for the year. If you have that early in your career, you will never recover from it because you're starting so far in the hole. People don't realize if the market drops 50%, it takes a hundred percent recovery to get back to square one, to get back to zero. So if your bottom decile one year as a manager and your fund has lost 15, 20, 25%, it's all but impossible to catch up. And Marx also points out,

and I don't remember it was 23 years or 21 years, but if you just take market returns, average returns over the course of two decades, you end up in the top quartile and the longer you go, you end up in the top quartile, and the longer you go, you end up in the top decile if you've given enough time. Markets compounding do amazing things, and much of the book's sort of lesson is, hey, whatever you do, don't interfere in the market's ability to compound. If you could prevent that, you're just so far ahead of everybody else.

Philip, you mentioned the unicorns. I feel like if the unicorns don't ever retire, then eventually even they become part of a discussion like, do they still have it? You know, Warren Buffett is obviously on the Mount Rushmore, but I do hear people discussing, Hey, uh, you know, can, can Berkshire still beat the market after all these years? So it's, it's difficult even for them to sustain the performance that they're famous for. Am I right about that?

No, you're absolutely right. In fact, even Warren Buffett can't keep up with Warren Buffett because, you know, I've seen a number of analyses that have pointed out that most of the out performance of Berkshire Hathaway took place,away took place 30, 40, 50 years ago. So that's one issue that's worth noting. The other thing that's also worth noting, I don't think people should market time. I don't think they should engage in the sort of speculation that I find to be fun. I started on a trading desk, but that said, for the third time in as many decades, I see Warren Buffett raising a lot of cash.

The last time he did that was heading into the financial crisis. The time before that was in the late nineties heading into the dot com implosion. So I don't think anyone has the ability to imitate these famous fund managers, but at the very least in terms of your expected returns, when Warren Buffett is raising cash, perhaps you should lower your expectations. We do a quarterly call for clients and it's, here's our overview of the economy, here's our overview of the market, here's what we think about all this means for your portfolio going forward. The lesson we discussed in the first week of

January of Q1 2025 was, hey, there isn't a big sample set for years where it's back-to-back 25% gains in the S&P 500. And the takeaway is lower your expectations When you're up 25 and 25 or 20 and change and 20 and change, the out years doesn't mean it's going to be a sell off. Doesn't mean it's going to be a terrible year, but stop thinking in terms of 20 plus percent. Think instead of, hey, if I see five, 6% on top of my 25 and 25, I'm doing great. Does that mean I should do something?

Because when you say lower your expectations, let's just say that I've got a plain vanilla portfolio. I've got my S and P 500 fund. I've got my bond fund and they've done well for me, but now I see that some of the tech stocks are sliding. Everyone's talking about the market being concentrated in tech. Some people are talking about, Hey, there's different things going on in the economy and tariffs and people are concerned or whatever.

And then I look at these returns, you're talking about, I say, I'm really nervous now, but at the same time, the wisdom is don't try to time the market. Must I do nothing and wait it out? Or is there anything that I can reasonably do? So it depends on who you are. And more importantly, how old you are and how far you are from retirement So someone says to me, hey, I'm 65. I'm retiring in the next five years. This market is making me nervous Well part of that answer should be what's your equity exposure? What's your bond exposure?

Hey, if you're an 80 20 or a-30 and you're retiring in a few years, maybe you have too much equity and that's why you're nervous. On the other hand, if you're 25-30, 40-50 years old and retirement is decades away, who cares what happens in any given month quarter year? You're looking 10-15 years on the other side of whatever happens with this administration, whatever happens with the tariffs, by the time you retire, this is ancient history. You said earlier you don't like anything. That's a feature, not a bug. That has kept your ancestors alive on the savanna for 10,000 generations. And, you know, the way we have managed to adapt and become the most, I want to say the fifth most successful species on the planet

after crabs, beetles, and mosquitoes, to say nothing of bacteria and virus, the traits that led us to be so adaptable doesn't really help us when you're need to make intelligent risk reward decisions in the capital markets. We never evolved to pick which muni bonds we should own. What we've evolved is, is this a threat? And if it is, here's our immediate response. That did not help us in the hunter gatherer times picking munis. That's right.

So give me, give me one or two things. Now the book is how not to invest. Give me one or two things that you think that a lot of people are out there were doing that you should not do. I'll give you my, probably my three favorite things. And one is an idea, one is a number and one is a behavior. and one is an idea, one is a number, and one is a behavior. So I am a giant consumer of media, and over the decades I've become very good at figuring out who's worth reading, who is intelligent, they have a defendable process, I can rely on them for insights and context. So that's one thing is be judicious in who and what you read or watch

in financial media, especially with the understanding that you're investing for decades, not Tuesday. So that's number one. The bad numbers that I think people misunderstand, the power of compounding is just so amazing. And I love to ask people this question. Two soldiers go off to World War I in 1917. They both have $1,000. One of them buries it in mason jars in the backyard. The other one invests it in the equivalent of the broad S&P 500. A century later, how did they each do? Well, we know what happened with the cash, but then I asked people, someone who put $1,000 into the stock market a century ago, what's it worth today? And the guesses are usually a million dollars. What's your guess? What's a thousand

dollars worth a century? Oh, I mean, it's got to be many millions of dollars. Right. 32 million dollars. And when you say that people like, no, that's not possible. And though you show them, here's what the rule of 72 does. Here's what happens if you're getting an 8% return with plus dividends reinvested. So I'm not even going to go 10%, but you know, typically the market doubles every seven and a half years. And over the course of a century, those doublings really, really add up pretty rapidly. We talked about Warren Buffett earlier. When you look at how long he's been investing, half of his net worth has come about in the past seven, eight years, because that's how that works. That's how the doubling works.

Seven years because that's how that works that's how the doubling works so the second thing is. Compounding is a mathematical miracle try not to interfere with it. Add the last thing is the behavior look my buddy dave not who is a market structure and etf wizard. Likes to say investing is a problem that's been solved we know how to invest for the long haul we know what works. The issue is in cracking the code of the market the issue is cracking the code of our own behavior the average investor under performs. There are only holdings by three to four percent. Wait, how is that possible? Well, it's possible because they buy high, they get panicked out, and when you look at what that holding, that fund, that ETF, that whatever did, the typical investor does worse than the

things they own. I find Cathie Woods to be a fascinating manager. ARK had one of the greatest years of any mutual funder ETF in history and a research report, I'm turning blank on the guy's name who wrote it, found that somewhere around 95% of ARK investors are underwater. Why? Because they chased it up in 2020, 2021, and they own it after 150% move. And so when mean reversion comes up, when that sector falls out of favor, as every style, region, sector, et cetera, eventually does, it means they bought high and now they're holding low. And it's a problem. It sounds like one theme, whether it's stated or not, one theme running through this book. And I often think about this. I don't often talk about it, but humility, right?

As an investor, like, I feel like there is so much pomposity in this field. And there are so many people out there that are puffing out their chest and they're talking about things, not just saying what they know and what they're sure of, but in a very combative way. And if you don't know this, you're doing for the ordinary person, just looking to put their money somewhere. And sometimes those people can sound persuasive. And also there's people out there who were talking about spectacular success.

But I wonder like, you know, people talk about the good things they're having, but there are the masses who have not done that well, you don't hear from. So you think you can repeat that one success that that one person keeps trumpeting. Um, but it sounds to me like there's a theme here, like just, you know, don't, don't be too fully yourself. Don't try to do too much. That's the phrase the kids use when you're, when you're, you know, they say DTM dad, you're doing too much, you know, from reminding them would be careful

about this, be careful about that dad. You're doing too much. You know, no, that's a hundred percent. And, and I think it is especially notorious in finance for a couple of reasons. So when you start out, there's a little bit of a fake it till you make it attitude. That is not uncommon. Most of the big houses used to have pretty substantial training, in quotes, training sessions.

Some of these were six months, 12 months, 18 months long. And the first couple of weeks is modern portfolio theory and asset allocation. And, you know, once you get through that, the next 11 months is sales training. And a big part of sales training is self-confidence and making sure the buyer believes you know more than they do. And, you know, academic studies have bore this out. When you put two people on TV and the host asks them, where's the market going to be in a year? Well, the first person can say, well, the future is inherently unknown and unknowable.

Random events happen so much, the pandemic, Gaza, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, nobody had these on their bingo cards. Markets give us, you know, 8, 10, 12 percent a year, so extrapolate 8 percent. That's the first answer, which is completely accurate and hated by viewers. No one wants to believe the world is random, even if it is. The second person says the Dow will be 48,763.5. And the more specific that person is, the more the viewers like them, the more they are to believe them. And it kind of reflects the old joke, you know, why do economists give us predictions to two decimal places? It's to show they have a sense of humor. And there's a lot, there's a lot to that.

Not only do we want specific forecasts to the decimal point, but if this strategist or forecaster had a wild outlier that came true. They got it right. Whether it was through skill or luck, it doesn't matter. The odds are that the viewer is going to very much believe what they have to say. At the same time, the odds are very high that they are going to be consistently wrong. If you get one outlier right, your future track record tends to be pretty poor. One last question before we go. A lot of people know you as a outlier, right, your future track record tends to be pretty poor. Uh, one last question before we go. A lot of people know you as a media guy, right? There's there's, uh, you know, you write podcasts and here's the, here's the book.

Um, but you have a wealth management business. If I asked you what you specialize in and you can't say rich people and you can't say turning money into more money, people ask me what I do. I say, I talk to rich people about what other rich people are saying about getting even richer is mainly what I do. So what kind of person would come see you? What's your specialty? So we don't have any minimums.

We work with people who are just starting out with no money, a couple of bucks. We have clients that are billionaires and everyone in between the firm runs over $5 billion for, I want to say just about 3000 families. And what we try and do is help people better understand what money is, how they can put it to work for themselves and how they should be thinking about it. You know, I grew up a Mets fan. I don't know if you remember Dave Kingman used to hit these towering, like, break windshields in the parking lot at Shea Stadium before the new city field,

but he struck out all the time. And you find that so many people are trying to hit these home runs. The net net is they have a low batting average and a lot of strikeouts. So we want people to focus on, Hey, just to continue our series of sports metaphors, just get some wood on the ball. Barry as a guy who made the town paper at 10 years old for hitting two home runs in one game, but who also struck out more than anyone else in the little league. You've really cut to my core here with some of these metaphors. You were the Dave Kingman of Westchester County. Of Dutchess County.

Dutchess County. Yeah, that's right. Exactly right. Thanks very much for your time. Nice to see you and best of luck with the book. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Joining the podcast now, a very special guest. Let me look at this guy. Let me look at this guy. Let me look at this face one last time.

I do think it's really important that the listeners know that Jackson joined the call with these shades on. That's how you know a guy has gotten too cool for you when he joins the call with the shades. Well, they're prescription sunglasses. And the problem with that is when you go inside wearing prescription sunglasses, you have to decide if you want things to be blurry

or you want them to be too dark. I had a pair like that. It's the most expensive glasses I've ever bought in my life. They were something like $800. No way. Yeah, no, yeah. There were multiples of any ones I've ever bought before. And I used to like them. I saw myself as a guy who would, I would wear these on the golf

course and then go into the office. And I thought this is going to be my thing. And then, and then my daughter was very young at the time and I had to tell her no about something and I, I bent down to her and I said no. And she pulled my glasses off my face and twisted them and threw them on the ground. My next pair cost like $150 and I've never spent that much again. Anyhow, Jackson Kittrell, our departing audio producer, leaving us for Jackson. I described this as industrial composting a startup.

Is that what, is that what it is? What are you doing? Yeah. Currently helping found an industrial composting startup. We take a food waste from large food waste producers and we put them in these giant tubes, basically they're 40 feet long, 15 feet wide, have some sort of proprietary tech inside. Can't talk about it too much. Um, yeah, that's what, that's what we're doing.

Well, Jackson, we're going to miss you. Will you be, um, will you be filling in, you know, if, if Alexis is on vacation, will you be filling in on the, on the podcast? Don't answer that. I'm not going to rule it out. Thank you everyone for listening. You can subscribe to the podcast and Apple podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen. If you're listening on Apple, you can write us a review.

If you have a question you'd like answered on the podcast, you can tape it on your phone. Use the voice memo app, email it to jack.how. That's H-O-U-G-H at barons.com. Jackson, tell them. See you next week.