Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - What Not to Do When the Market Is Down with Peter Mallouk

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Today, Nicole continues to unpack do's and don'ts for market downturns— this time, she's joined by Peter Mallouk, President and CEO of award-winning wealth management firm Creative Planning. In this conversation, Nicole and Peter break down the smart (and not-so-smart) moves to make when the market’s in the red. To learn more about Creative Planning and how they could help you meet your financial goals, visit: www.creativeplanning.com/nicole

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Bank NA. Spot me eligibility requirements and overdraft limits apply. Out-of-network ATM withdrawal and OTC advance fees may apply. Late payment may negatively impact your credit I'm Nicole Lapin, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand, it's time for some money rehab. Over the last month, you've been hearing me decode all of the latest dips in the stock market and tell you where the opportunities are right now. And I have some new perspective for you today from one of my all-time favorite recurring guests Peter Maluk. Peter of course is president and CEO of Creative Planning, an award-winning wealth management and advisory firm with over $354 billion in combined assets under management or advisement by Creative Planning and its affiliates as of December 31, 2024. You know that I loved Creative Planning's approach to wealth management so much that

I actually joined their team as a financial education advocate. Today we talk about some things to do and not to do in times when the stock market is down and stay tuned to the end of the episode where I share with you how you can get one-on-one help from Peter's team as well. But first, here's our conversation. Peter Maluk, welcome back to Money Rehab. Good to be back. Good to see you.

What a couple of weeks it has been. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I think that like if you've been doing this a long time, you just know this stuff happens every year or two, one way or another. Bear market every four or five years, but you just get used to it. And it's a different story every time. It's kind of like if you've seen a romantic comedy or a horror movie, they have kind of this general same thread that goes through every single one of them, but that's a different story. So it keeps you interested. That's how I see bear markets. Sometimes it's a health scare.

Sometimes it's a terrorist event. Sometimes it's a war. Sometimes it's a housing crisis. This time it's tariffs. You know, you just always have a different story but in general, it's a similar movie. And so if you've been doing it a while, you just embrace it. You just embrace it. I do think they're like horror movies in the sense that we know something bad is going to happen and then it gets really scary and even though we know how this ends you you still get scared through the whole movie and then we think we've killed the bad guy but then the bad guy is really alive that's exactly like a bear market whenever it's gone it'll be back might be back a year from now might be back

five years from now but it's always coming back yep so bear market down 20% every four or five years correction down 10% every couple of years. We know this, but somehow it feels it always feels different. Like this one's going to be a different one from all of the time in history. You know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. So people are definitely feeling scared and panic, especially around Liberation Day or as Bloomberg called it, Obliteration Day. Can you take us into the creative planning offices? We love you guys. I'm sure the energy was nuts that day. I mean, what was going on? Were you glued to CNBC or Bloomberg? Was your phone ringing off the hook? What was going on? Well, it was very interesting because, you know, typically with a bear market, there's a series of events that come all at once, you know, COVID, 9-11, 0-8-09 housing crisis.

And this was very much just one person making an announcement, right? And so President Trump had been talking during the election, after the election about what he was going to do. He said he was going to impose tariffs, but he had used certain words like targeted, disciplined, focused. And this was tariffs on everybody everywhere and much more extreme than he originally indicated. He originally indicated 10% and they were coming out with these huge deals. So watching that announcement, watching the markets tank at the same time, you know, I wouldn't say anyone here was nervous or worried.

It was just like, well, here we go. You know, I mean, the market's going to have to price all this in very quickly and really one administration is going to decide what happens in the market for the next 30 to 60 days. Now this can go on for a while where no matter what they decide they want to do enough damage could be caused that it takes on its own life force and a whole other issues come into play. But right now, I mean, the administration can make it much worse or much better depending

on what decisions they make along the way. And so our job is to just navigate our clients through it and if opportunities present themselves, make sure that we seize them. So let's talk high level about what those opportunities could be. What do you tell investors who don't know what to do with their portfolios right now? I'm sure even though you guys are calm because you've seen this movie before, people freak out and they call and they want to panic sell. Right. So I think it is interesting because there's all kinds of people out there and there's what I would call the retail investor kind of doing things on their own. There's retail investors that have advisors.

Those would be creative planning clients. There's institutional investors, which are big universities, endowments, and so on. Our typical client really is as a group is generally unfazed by all of this. So we're constantly educating them on just like you said, at the top of this, Nicole, right, corrections happen about every year or two. They're 10% or more. The average one's 14%. Bear markets, this is the third one in five years where there's a drop of 20% or more. I mean, they know this stuff is going to happen and we've built their portfolios to prepare for it. So if you're young, we've coached people that are young. Like this is amazing. You know, the longer a market

can stay down, if you're young, the better. Cause you're saving, you're buying, you wanna buy while they're at discounted prices. You don't want the market at all time highs. You want it to stay down. If you're young or even if you're 55 and you're putting money away, the market run up yesterday was not positive

because you want it to be lower while you're buying. But if you're retired or you're older and you're relying on the portfolio, well, you should have bonds to cover your short-term needs. So either way, the prepared investor isn't phased because they're prepared. They know these things happen and their portfolio is built in a way to prepare them. I think the average American, that's not how they're making their decisions, right? They're buying stocks that they like and they watch them go down 20 or 30% and then they panic and then they go to cash and then the market goes up and you have this irreversible error and you see that with the flows in bear markets

people tend to exit the market at the worst times and enter at the worst times yeah I mean I think that when anything chaotic happens so it's good to take a pause whether in your personal life, in the market, not act irrationally, but during a downturn, you know, emotions get the better of people. Do you tell investors to stay the course with dollar cost averaging, or could there be a moment to double down and invest more, more aggressively if, you know, high quality investments are so-called on sale? Whatever they're doing in their 401k or that regular paycheck should always continue.

But if for any reason there was some hoarding along the way, where there was money, cash kept to the side that's not needed for emergency reserve, we do encourage them to invest that when the market's down. We never call the bottom. I think of it like mortgage rates drop 1%, you refi your home, doesn't mean it's the bottom. They might drop again, you just refi again. And so the more aggressive you can be buying in the down market, the better. In your experience, what's more damaging in a downturn, bad investment or a panicked investor? The panicked investors, the biggest mistakes come from the panicked investors. If you're diversified, the way you're going to screw things up, the main way is by panicking. Now,

if you only own one or two or three individual stocks, you have to worry both about the investor and the holdings. But if you're diversified, it's really the behavior that will drive the outcome. If you've got the right behaviors, the right actions follow those behaviors, you're going to be totally fine. Most of the permanent damage you see in portfolios

is caused by people making mistakes. Do you ever find yourself playing therapist more than financial advisor during some of these times? I'm sure I mean, I know you're the head honcho, but maybe somebody so freaked out. They're like, I must talk to the CEO, I must get to the top, I must panic sell and then the red phone rings. I don't know what happens over there. But how do you balance empathy with tough love in those conversations? I think empathy is the key to this because a lot of people will call and say, I know what you're going to say, but and then they'll ask the question. They just want the reassurance. And kind of what I tell our team here is, you know, the churches in America were full after 9-11 and nobody wanted to go there and hear anything but what they've always heard,

right? You want to be reassured in times of stress. And so reaffirming, hey, we've talked about these things and we've set up the portfolio this way and this is how this normally plays out is very encouraging. And that's really less about investing and more about education and empathy. Yeah. There's a little bit therapist that goes into this too. I think people want to know that it's going to be okay ultimately and you can't hear enough. So I want to dig into some strategy. What's your take on rebalancing during a downturn? So I'm a big fan of rebalancing in a bear market. And so if you think about a client that might have 80% stocks and 20% bonds, when the stock

market goes down 20%, you're no longer 80-20. You now have less in stocks because the stock value has gone down, you've got more in bonds. The time to rebalance is right then when the market's down, sell those bonds, buy more stocks. That's forcing you to buy the stocks when they're low. When the market eventually recovers, and that's what's happened, every time in history, you'll be ahead of the market because you will have added to that position in the down market. So that's something called opportunistic rebalancing. Some people never rebalance, some people rebalance once a year, that's called periodic rebalancing. The really the best investor will rebalance when the opportunity really presents itself. Is it also a good time for tax loss harvesting? And if somebody doesn't know what that is, can you briefly explain it?

It's a fantastic time for tax loss harvesting and basically that's realizing losses on purpose. So this is really hard for people to get excited about. So let's take last year, let's say you owned the S&P 500 and you owned all 500 companies. Well over the course of the year, the S&P 500 went up about 25%. That's great. And if you owned just the index, you would do no tax loss harvesting. It went straight up. But let's say you owned all 500 stocks and some of those stocks were negative throughout the year. Let's say Visa goes down, we would

sell it and buy MasterCard. If Conoco goes down, you sell it, you buy Exxon. And you, you know, Hershey's goes down, you sell it, you buy Nestle. Well, what happens is at the end of the year, you still get the same or extremely similar return to the index. You still have that 25%. But because you sold certain things when they went negative and replaced them, you get to put those losses on your tax return. And then you get paid back by the government on those based on your tax rates. So you will wind up with the 25% return plus some additional savings on top of it. So it's an incredible opportunity when the market's down to be able to do things like that.

And how do you help clients decide when it's worth locking in a loss for a future tax gain? So at what point does Visa have to be in order to take advantage of tax loss harvesting? Or is that something you do regularly? It's something we do regularly. And there's so much that goes into it. The market can't be too volatile to do it. It can't have, there has to be a lot of people trading. It has to be what we call, there has to be what we call liquidity in the business, you know, buyers and sellers really active. So we just automatically do it when all of the conditions are met. But usually if something's negative, we're just going to do it. You alluded to a Buffettism that when you're young,

you should want everything to go down and stay down until you know, you need it later on in life for clients nearing retirement during a recession, though they don't have the luxury at that time. So what are the moves that you would have them make to protect their runway without sacrificing long-term growth? Yeah, I mean, you make a great point about the young investors. I mean, if you really believe like, okay,

the market's at this level and when I'm retired, it's gonna be much higher, the path from here to there, you want it to be as negative as possible and make it all up at the end. The sequence of the returns really impacts how much money you will have. But for the person approaching retirement, a lot of times they go,

well, Peter, I need the money. I need the money in a year or two. And the answer is sort of really when most people retire, they're still going to live 20 to 40 more years. They still need a very, very long term portfolio. You know, in 1950, if you retired, the average person died that day. The life expectancy, average person retired in their 60s and the average person died in their 60s.

Well, that's not the case anymore. People still retire in their 60s on average, but they live into their 80s on average. So we need this portfolio to go on a long, long, long time. Still has to be heavily weighted towards stocks and things like that. But what that person should start doing is they approach retirement is have enough bonds that between their remaining years of work

and a couple more years on top of that, they're not at the mercy of the market. So, for example, if someone's going to retire in one year, they'd have maybe four years of bonds. So you've got one year of work plus four years of bonds, that's five years. The stock market can do whatever it's going to do because you're covered in the short run. It's a really, really good point that I think gets missed in this conversation that you

don't take your money out the day you retire. You need it. I mean, there's the 4% rule that you can take out a little bit, live off that and have the rest continue to grow. That's right. That's exactly right. I mean, a lot of people think financial advisors are managing portfolios just by some set of benchmarks or rules, but in a downturn, what's some of the invisible work you're doing behind the scenes that clients who don't see? I mean, I think the big things an advisor can do is they can, it depends what your asset

classes you're in. So there can be a lot of opportunities in private investments, which have now become available to more and more people that really can present themselves in bear markets, things like private equity, private lending, private real estate, and in an all stock portfolio, people should be looking for opportunities to buy high quality parts of the portfolio while they're weaker. So for example, today, the magnificent sevens in a severe bear market, the seven biggest tech stocks in the United States, Nvidia, Google, and so on. I mean, if you really believe in those companies a month ago or two months ago, you should really be excited about them now and helping people lean into those

opportunistically rebalancing, switching asset classes in a down market. And then as you mentioned earlier, Nicole, taking advantage of tax situations. I think all of those are kind of just the beginning. But the other thing that an advisor can do is really help somebody determine their risk tolerance. Because you can talk about it all you, anybody can talk about risk tolerance all they want. You really find out in a bear market

what someone's risk tolerance really is. So these are the times for people to be asking themselves, hey, am I really in the right portfolio for me? Can I live through this if it went on for months and months and months? Yeah, I think somehow we change mid game, mid play. I'm not a good sports analogy person, but we're long-term investors

and then something like this happens. We can't all of a sudden switch to be short-term investors, right? We have to decide, are you a short-term investor, in which case that's a different bag, or a long-term investor, in which case the blinders have to go on as painful as it is. That's right. I mean, you can't, when you're on the roller coaster and you're in the middle of the bear market, you cannot get off the roller coaster. You have to follow it to the end, get through the bear market, but then ask yourself, am I really going to ride that roller coaster again? Because the bear market is going to happen again. Like we said, it's just like the horror movie, there's going to be a sequel. And so if you can't take it after that ride is over, get yourself on a different type

of roller coaster, maybe a more moderate one. If you're totally unfazed, maybe you can even take more risk in terms of accept more volatility in your portfolio and move upstream. But the decision should be made after the market has returned to normal. I really like the roller coaster analogy because I think there is a cost of admission, right, to get to the carnival, to get into the investing world. You are able to get, you know, seven to 10% returns over time. And so the ups and downs and the volatility is part of doing business as an investor. So I think that's important to remember. But I, you know, people want to know how long those downs are going to be and how long the ups are going to be. Those are things we definitely don't know. But from what you're seeing right now, is this more of a temporary storm? Do you think this is, you know, more of a Russia Ukraine situation where we rebounded in a matter of months or is this more of a 2008

when it took a few years to bounce back? Well, I think the worst case scenario is off the table. So I think that the announcement that hey, we're going to work things out with most countries, the markets has some relief there. But I think this is going to go on for quite a while, because the reality is, we're now doubling down on a trade war with China, which is our biggest trade partner. So it's a bigger deal to be in a trade war with China than the bottom 40 countries in the world. So I think that's a real thing. For negotiations with the EU, Canada, Mexico, this is going to go on for a while. And I think there will be more. I

don't think it's over. Let's put it that way. Now we just talked to Steve Eisman, who of course, if anyone saw the big short, hopefully everybody did. Steve Carell's character was based on and he was like, come on, this is not a 2008. We were looking death in its eye. That was Armageddon. This is not that. This looks more of a, like one of the garden variety corrections in this game. 100%.

Yeah, in terms of bear markets, as dramatic as it is, it would be on the lower end of drama in terms of bear markets. Like I don't wanna bring back the PTSD of 2008. We both lived through it. I was covering it. You were managing money,

dealing with margin calls, I'm sure. But that was when the big banks were going to go out, that was a whole different bag. Can we just remind our listeners of that? Yeah. I mean, we're talking about an existential threat to the global economy, even working, right? If the banking system collapses, it's like the circulatory system of your body, you just can't function without it. And that's what we were talking about then. You could even say with COVID, everyone thought they were going to die

for a period of time there. I mean, these are really, really big events that were external. This is self-caused. No one thinks the global economy is gonna collapse. No one thinks everyone's going to die. We're going to get through this one way or another. Yeah, I mean, we call them black swan events

after economist Nisim Taleb, where they're basically events we can never predict. 9-11, COVID. This was actually something that President Trump talked about when he was campaigning. To your point, he said he was going to be much more targeted and precise, and then it got really aggressive, so people freaked out. But do you remind clients that, you know, we already knew about this?

This was told to us. Well, I mean, definitely it was much bigger scale than expected, so I would never tell them like, hey, this was totally forecasted. But I do think that knowing there was going to be some tariff dispute, this should not be a surprise. And he did it in his first presidency to in the market also went down 20%. At that point, it took three weeks for that to happen. So it was a little less dramatic, but it went on very,

a very long time, it took almost a year for the market to get back to normal. As you know, it's very hard not to mourn paper losses. It's also hard not to rejoice paper gains, right? The most important day is the day you buy and the day you sell and the rest is a whole bunch of, you know, nausea or whatever. But I think that, you know, optimizing gains is another part of this story. So if we could switch gears and talk about some of the asset classes or strategies you find yourself looking for more often

in a recession that clients might not expect, where are the big opportunities? Well, the big opportunities in a recession are building the ownership part of your portfolio. So all investments fall into one of two categories, owner or lender. So if you fall into one of two categories, owner or lender. So if you own US stocks or international stocks or real estate fund or private equity fund, or you own your own business, or you own a duplex, you run out, those are all ownership investments.

And then the other side lending is loan money to the federal government. That's the treasury. You loan it to the state of California. That's a municipal. You loan it to Microsoft. That's a corporate bond. Those are all loans. I mean, loan money to your friends, you know, that's a bond as well. But in a recession, it's when being an owner, all those ownership assets are on sale in the recession. So really looking for the quality there that fits your long-term approach and going as far into that as you possibly can, that's the perfect time to be doing it. But the lender assets are on sale too, in kind of a weird way. What do you make of what the bond market is doing? It's doing something that we we don't typically see.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah, this is very, very rare, Nicole. So basically in a normally when stocks are down, bonds are up. That's what happens about 85% of the time. That's not what happened this time. And part of that was, we don't know if Japan and China were starting to sell all their bonds, but something happened over the last couple of days where there was a lot of supply of bonds thrown on the market and it drove bond prices down. So you're seeing both bonds and stocks go down at the same time. But even with that, they go down very differently. When bonds go down, they go down usually a few percent while stocks are going down 10 times as much. So even when they're not behaving

exactly the way we want them to, they're still providing a buffer. And what do you think about this idea that a lot of this could be manufactured to bring down yields when bonds are rolled over and so much debt is refinanced this year, $9 trillion of debt is coming up. And if you think about the Trump administration's like a kind of perfect storm, you know, not too hot, not too cold, just the perfect gold deluxe moment would be that they negotiate a better tariff deal with every country on earth, that they get what the other things that they want around immigration with Mexico or drugs with other countries or TikTok and the Panama Canal with China. Then they have low inflation. They have peace

breakout with low oil prices, which really helps with low inflation, but that along the way, there's enough weakness that the Federal Reserve has to lower interest rates. So when all of this debt comes due next year, all those treasuries get replaced with lower paying treasuries. So the federal government's paying less in interest. There was a lot of talk that that's what Trump was trying to do was talk the economy down, drive the stock market down, push the Federal Reserve to lower rates. Then you get the lower rates and then you have the negotiations. I mean, I think there was some truth to that because while the market was going down, he was publicly talking to the Federal Reserve chair saying, hey, you should really lower

rates. I mean, this wasn't a secret, it wasn't back channels. He was doing it online. So I think it's very clear that that's the outcome that he wanted. The bond market did the opposite as foreign countries started to dump their bonds and probably as part of the tariff war to put him in that spot. And to be clear, the president cannot control the Fed,

but it does seem like a kind of a game of chicken. That's right. Will the Fed capitulate? Will the president pause on tariffs? We don't know, unless you know, I don't know. No one knows. And I always tell people if somebody tells you that they know, don't take advice from that person.

Nobody knows exactly what the Fed is going to do, where the markets are going to go. It's just too many factors, too many variables. I guess the different variable this time than previous times is the amount of information or misinformation going on on Twitter that's moving trillions of dollars in the market so, so rapidly. I haven't seen anything like that. I mean, this was incredible. Somebody posted something online, the stock market started

to soar a couple of days ago, then it came out that that person didn't, wasn't really correct. And then the market dropped. It just showed the power of information. You know, if people think anything is reliable, they're looking for that clue, that head start and you know, Twitter really, you see so much information come out in real time, whether it's from Republicans or Democrats or economists. But you know, in this case, it wound up being not true and the markets quickly self corrected. But Twitter is a place where people are going to try to get more information

about what's about to happen. I mean, the president himself came out and said to investors to buy right before he paused the tear. I don't even know if that's legal. We've never seen this. It is absolutely crazy. You know that the person who basically had the button to control the global economy and the markets that day

in advance on Twitter said time to buy is just you can't write this stuff. I mean, it's just incredible. Yeah, this is this is like an Academy Award winning horror film. You know, I know we've been talking generally, Peter, but for this moment, we've seen big banks increase their chance of recession. J.B. Morgan's at 60% right now. Do you agree with that? Do you think a recession is on the horizon?

Well, it's, you know, these predictions, they really almost have to change day to day. I mean, they changed from last Thursday to this Monday. And I think from post the announcement that we're not going to have this tariff war with most of the countries on earth, I would think those recession odds have come down. I mean, there's always a reasonable chance of a recession in the next two years. There's always, I think, a 20% chance of that happening kind of no matter what's going on in the world. I think that the odds are probably still less than 40%

Although some people think we're already in a recession if that's the case I'll take it because all things considered. It's a pretty mild one if unemployment is gonna stay under 5% And you're gonna still have strong corporate earnings while we're going through a recession. That's not bad I think that a lot of people think that the Trump administration wants a mild recession because to your point earlier, that would lead to the Fed lowering interest rates, which would lead to the federal government paying less interest on its debt and mortgage prices going down and so on. I think that's a dangerous game. And we saw the Trump administration blink when bond yields moved against them.

So I think they're very, very sensitive to where interest rates are. Yeah. And if it's not a technical recession, it's certainly a vibe session. And people's feelings, especially consumer sentiment, drives a lot of this market stuff. On the flip side, though, you have we have Ray Dalio coming on the show soon. He thinks the world is ending. So he thinks that there's, this is the beginning of a sovereign debt crisis. Where do you hedge against that?

Because that's a very extreme view of what we're, what the end of this movie looks like. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think Ray is a historian, right. And if you look at all empires, they eventually collapse. But they don't need to collapse with total implosion. Like we, the United States took over being the world superpower from the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom stock market has soared during that time period. It doesn't necessarily mean that

everything implodes and is lit on fire. And I think Ray, just to be frank, has had this message for a very, very, very, very long time. A very long time. And I think that it's reflected in the way that their funds have been positioned and have done. I don't share that sentiment. I think the United States has some things that are unique

relative to previous superpowers. We've got friendly neighbor to the north and the south, and we've got these huge oceans on both sides of us. There is no more secure country on earth geographically. We've got the number one river tributary system in the world. We're drowning in natural riches, whether it's timber or oil or natural gas or water. The United States is one of only seven countries that's totally independent, could function without any other country if it needed to, and our nuclear powerhouse with

the strongest military to ever exist in the history of the world. And I think you put those things together. I mean, there's a lot of room for error in the United States. It's very different than just a regular country like say Greece or Venezuela or Zimbabwe, where you have a currency crisis and everything falls apart. That doesn't mean we're on the right track. I agree with Ray, we're not on the right track at all. I mean, the national debt's out of control. The interest we're paying on it is out of control. This will create a crisis at some point, but I don't extend it to the collapse, the same degree of collapse that Ray Dalio does. No matter what happens, we will be prepared. Thank you to the strategies that you've laid out here today, Peter. We appreciate it.

As you know, we end our episodes with a tip that listeners can take straight to the bank. Tell me, is now more important than ever to have a financial advisor? I think this is, if you don't have one and you don't have a plan, you've been nervous, you don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity, you're not placing any tax trades,

this is a time to explore. If you're going to explore, make sure you find somebody who is a fiduciary 100% of the time, doesn't own any of their own investment products, is not licensed to sell a commissionable investment. Get somebody that has to be on your side of the table all the time. And that also does planning so that that portfolio can be part of your specific goals. Where you see people go off the rails is, Nicole, what you and I talked about earlier.

They don't really have a plan. They've just bought investments. And so that can lead to poor decisions. If you have a plan and all the investments are pointed towards the short-term, intermediate-term and long-term plan, obviously you're more likely to hit your goals that way. You don't need a crystal ball, just a decent rear view mirror. That's exactly right. Well, I told you I'd help you get one-on-one help from Peter's team as well. So as promised, you can sign up for a free 15-minute call with the Creative Planning team to hear how they can work with you to help you achieve your goals.

You can sign up for the call at creativeplanning.com slash Nicole. Money Rehab is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lapin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Lavoie. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some Money Rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have

your questions answered on the show or even have a one on one intervention with me and follow us on Instagram at money news and tick tock at money news network for exclusive video content. And lastly, thank you. Seriously, thank you. Thank you for listening and for investing in yourself, which is the most important investment you can make.