Shaun Newman Podcast - #1012 - Andrew Ruhland

Episode Date: March 5, 2026

Andrew Ruhland, CFP, is the Founder, President, and Wealth Advisor at Integrated Wealth Management, a fully independent firm he established in late 2008 to provide clients with greater independence, effective risk controls, reduced administrative complexity and costs, and candid communication about economic risks and opportunities. With three decades of experience, he has taught retirement planning workshops, hosted the weekly radio program "Your Money and Your Life," contributed articles to Michael Campbell’s Money Talks blog, appeared in national television features and publications on wealth management innovations, and remains an active voice in optimizing client outcomes. Integrated Wealth ManagementWebsite: www.i-wealth.caTickets to Cornerstone Forum 26’: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone26/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Viva Fry. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is J.P. Sears. Hi, this is Frank Paredi.

This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. How's everybody doing today? Happy Thursday. Yeah, when did that sneak up?

I tell you what, we're rolling into March. And I don't know if I told people this or not, But, you know, remember a while back I had Mikkel Thorupon, and he was, if you recall, he was talking to me about, hey, you should come to Panama, Panama City for my conference. Well, I'm on my way. So, yeah, this has been a whirlwind of a week trying to get things done in proper places, and, you know, you've got the forum.

What is it now? 24 days away, I think it is, 23 days away, one of the two. Last time I checked, we had three tickets left. So I don't even know if there's a ticket left for that, which is super cool. We're going to have a sellout in Calgary. And one of the companies that brought me to Calgary with Silver Gold Bull, along with Bull Valley Credit Union. So just before we get an ad reads, yeah, I'm on my way to Panama right now.

Going to be there. Should be back by the start of next week with hopefully no issues. And I've been tapped on the shoulder to give a talk on the state of Canada. So you can imagine my thoughts. and hopefully if I don't have video of it, I'll be able to post something on substack so people can see what I said. But we'll wait and see what McKell has to say.

Be interesting to see him in his backyard, I guess. And yeah, I'm on my way down there this week. I left at, well, I guess as you're listening to this, I left at midnight from Calgary. So barring any mishaps, that's where I'm sitting right now. and how about we get on to some Adreads? I know there's going to be some people, God, get to it already, shot, get to it.

All right. Well, when it comes to precious metals, all right? If you're interested in precious metals, you've been paying attention to the old silver wagon. Well, let's pay attention to the silver wagon for two seconds. A buck 1429 today. So it's up, down, it's all over the place. It is the wagon.

And, you know, we're going to talk a little bit about precious metals today. But before we get there, whether you're interested in precious metals, or not. The company, I mean, if you're interested in precious metals, I should say, the company that I point to with all their in-house solutions is Silver Gold Bowl, whether it's

buying, selling, or storing precious metals. You can text or email, Graham, for details down in the show notes with any questions you have around all the things. Investing in precious metals or for any feature deals, silver deals, exclusively for you, the SMP, listener, Silvergoldbull.com.ca is where you can find them.

Guardian plumbing and heating. These guys have been keeping homes, farms, and businesses running smoothly since 2010, whether it's expert service, cutting-edge power solutions or advice you can trust, Guardian plumbing and heating has your back, and they're going to be back at the Cornerstone Forum this year as one of the trade show booths. So if you're like, hang, I wouldn't mind bump it into these guys, well, now you can. They're going to be at the Cornerstone Forum, one of the booths set up, say how to Blaine and Joy when you go walking through. You can also find them at Guardianplumbing.ca,

guardian plumbing and heating, protecting their customers from the unexpected through innovative solutions. Ignite Distribution is a high service supply company at a Wainwright, Alberta. I hope you got your order in on March 2nd with all the savings, okay? I hope you did. They specialize in automotive parts and a wide range of additional products, including safety equipment, welding supplies, fasteners, and janitorial items. They operate as a NAPA auto parts. you can get a hold of them at 7808423433 and say hello to Shane Stafford and his team.

Shane is an absolute beauty. And I really hope somebody, or a bunch of you, I should say, reached out about their big sale. Because, I mean, the savings were pretty incredible. The Cornerstone Forum. Yes, it returns March 28th. And as varying this, I don't know if there's any tickets left. I have no idea. I'm probably on a plane somewhere.

And, well, not somewhere, Panama City. And the truth of the matter is, I've been yelling at this for, what about a month now get your tickets gets your tickets gets your tickets and i can almost assume i'm going to wake up one of these mornings to a flurry of text saying hey can i get a ticket to that i don't know to tell you we had 700 we had three left pretty sure they're sold out that's that's my guess all right if you're listening or watching on spotify apple youtube rumble x facebook substack make sure to subscribe make sure to leave a review and share with a friend if you're enjoying now let's get on to that tale of the tape

Today's guest is the founder, president and wealth advisor at Integrated Wealth Management. I'm talking about Andrew Ruland. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Andrew Ruland. Sir, thanks for hopping on. My pleasure.

Good to see you. Yeah. Well, it is. And, well, I don't know. Let's start here. I'll start off nice and simple for Andrew this morning. Who is Andrew? Because they're, you know, like in our conversations,

One of the things that perked my ears up, you know, I had Michael Campbell on the show. I think that was last year. But we started talking about money talks and a few different things. I was like, oh, this is interesting. But a lot of people on this side of things, my audience, are going to have probably zero clue who you are. I could be wrong. I could be very wrong. Maybe a ton of people know, Andrew.

But let's assume they don't. And let's just start with a little bit about yourself before we jump into a whole bunch of, you know, different topics. Sure. Well, first off, a lot of our clients actually listen to your podcast. So hopefully there's a little bit of crossover. If people listen to the Money Talks podcast or used to listen to the Money Talks show on the Chorus Radio Network before Mike was fired for criticizing the government about COVID before that happened. That would never happen, would it? Oh, my goodness, no.

So, yeah, anyways. So I've been in the financial industry since September of 1994. So I'm just starting in the midst of my 32nd year of doing this. Worked with a number of smaller independent mutual fund dealerships and that was bought by a larger one. And that company called Assante. And I decided to leave in 2008 because I was very concerned about, what I was reading in the independent financial press. The price of gold was going up, which is not a good sign for stability. And there was this thing called the subprime crisis happening.

And we have these mortgage-backed securities. We started hearing about all these arcane derivatives in the very opaque derivatives market, things like collateralized debt obligations and synthetic collateralized debt obligations. So leverage upon leverage upon leverage. And I was concerned about that. And so I was actually looking for another dealer to hang my shingle with. And I was actually in Toronto talking to one of those dealers the very day that Lehman Brothers went down, which was September 15th of 2008. And so I flew home and I knew things weren't good because of the scope of all of the red on the ticker. And it was one of those, oh, crap moments. And since I had already been looking for another place to go independent or to hang my shingle,

and I realized that all the firms that wanted to, you know, to pay me to bring my business over, they just all wanted me to put my client's portfolios in their proprietary stuff, which is the highest margin stuff for the company, tends to be a higher fee for the client. So it's in the company's best interest, not in the client's best interest. So I made a decision over the next six weeks or so to go completely independent. And I did that on Boxing Day of 2008. I had been operating my company name, but had to use the previous dealer's banner for branding purposes. And I just went completely independent in the middle of the 0809 crisis.

And, you know, wasn't allowed to solicit clients, but we were allowed to tell them where we were going. We went independent, hired a couple of independent portfolio managers. And about 70% of my clients followed me in the middle of the storm. But it was pretty rocky starting from scratch. But, you know, we had good asset management. And here we are, 17 years and change later. We built our own infrastructure. Our portfolio managers are excellent discretionary managers.

Money is custodied at a big six bank, whether it's national bank or RBC. And we do extensive wealth management. So tax planning, retirement planning, some of the basics of the state planning, a little bit on the asset protection of the insurance side. So what we call the full integrated wealth management process. So that's us. Can you do, I don't know, obviously you can tell me, but you know, like when you're talking about working for a name brand company and then going independent besides the fees that change, what have you, like, what has been the big difference maybe for you or your clients? I don't know, maybe both.

You know, when you're talking about, you know, like I'm working for a big firm. This is the name and you come here and you deal with us and going, you know, and I think you're. you said 2008, boxing day? New Year's Eve, one of the two. Boxing day, yeah. Boxing day. Middle of the crisis.

December 26th, 2008, you go, that's it. I'm going independent. Well, I mean, you've had well over a decade, almost two now of independent. What is the big thing? I don't know, the big change of being independent. Permission to speak freely, sir? That's it.

that's it. The permission to speak freely. So when I was in that that corporate world, despite the fact that we were all self-employed and responsible for all of our own expenses and our own marketing and everything, the fact is, is that they had this pretty narrow path that defined what we were allowed to talk about with our clients. So anything that was kind of outside of the, I'll call it the Overton window, of what the compliance department allowed us to talk about. So we weren't allowed to talk about geopolitics. We weren't allowed to actually talk about either provincial or federal politics in Canada,

other than making reference to policies that have been implemented. So we weren't allowed really to express opinion to go with, or opinions that were derived from the facts that we were observing. So essentially, I went from being a, an independent thinking dog with a muzzle to an independent dog without a muzzle. Just one question on that for when you're working for it and you're not allowed to talk. When you say you're not allowed to talk, do you mean you're not allowed to talk like we're talking right now? Or you mean when you have a client in, you can have thoughts, but you've got to be very careful on how you describe those thoughts because if it's taken the wrong way and it gets back up to the higher ups, you could be in trouble.

More so about public speak because frankly, clients hired us because we're frank and we tell them what we really think based on what we observe and what we can foresee and forecast based on what the underlying factors are. So we never had a problem with clients. They like that about us. It was more so on what we could say in public presentations, what we could say in marketing, community. what we could say in a newsletter, I'll say. Okay. Well, the fact that 70% of your clients went with you in crisis mode tells you had, tells me you had a lot of loyalty of the people that were dealing directly with you, Andrew. Yeah, and that was despite the fact that the company, as per their normal procedure, they assigned every one of our clients to one of three different

advisors. Two of them happened to be in the same office as me. And one of the one of the that I was they were my business partners uh for our uh rental space and another one from from another branch and they're all required to go try and move the client the clients actually got reassigned to them and they had to make the decision to either stay with them move uh with us or move somewhere else whatever they they chose to do but uh so i had three advisors going after my clients and they already had all the client information and so yeah so it was a it was a pretty big deal. It was a very stressful time. But the fact is, is that I knew that if I didn't make a move when I was that age, I was 41 at the time, that I was going to be part of the problem and not part

of the solution because I knew that, you know, we would have financial crises going forward because all systems that are built on leverage and all systems that are susceptible to to corruption are vulnerable to things going too far and ultimately having, you know, major pullbacks, major crises, not just market driven stuff, but like in 2008, that was a systemic risk based on too much leverage of large financial institutions and, you know, the fun and games that happen amongst the Wall Street crowd that are very, very competitive. and who gets the bailout and who doesn't. So that's kind of what ended up happening during the financial crisis in 2008.

And I just knew, again, this is going to happen again. And my clients trust me to do everything that's within my power to protect their capital. And so I need to do this or I don't deserve their trust. You said in 2008, or when you first started, I should say, it was a bit of a rocky start. When you say Rocky Start, do you mean some of the things you invested in didn't do that well? Or do you mean Rocky Start in the sense of like, holy crap, I'm starting a whole new business and I've got to figure out a whole bunch of things and I'm independent. So there's a little bit of doors slammed in my face, that type of thing. It was, there was certainly some of the latter.

But the single biggest part of it was the fact that we still had not hit the ultimate bottom in equity markets. That didn't happen until March 9th of 2009. And so we had markets all over the place. And so, you know, we're moving client capital over, moving assets in kind from the previous accounts to the new managers. And, you know, having to make big decisions in real time, well, the markets are just swinging around. And so it was a bit of a chaotic time. But it was one of those times when, you know, you're running on adrenaline the, the whole time. And once that bottom was in, of course, there's a lot of mistrust that the bottom is actually in.

And so there's, you know, there's lingering, lingering fear of loss of capital. And ultimately, when that happens at those extremes of, extremes of panic and fear, that's when risk is actually lowest and that, you know, we have a saying that risk is lowest when price is lowest and risk is highest when price is highest. So, but that's logical. And when people are running on the extreme emotions, logic is not their primary decision making criteria. When you talk about markets being a little bit all over the place, how are today's markets then? Let's fast forward to 2026. You got, since the start of this year, you got, just geopolitically, you got Maduro,

yanked out of Venezuela, you got what's going on in Mexico. Then you got Iran getting bombed, you know, like when we sat and talked about you coming on, I don't know what that was. Was that a month ago? I can't, it might even, you know. Five weeks ago, yeah. We were sitting there and sure Maduro had been by that time taken. You know, okay, well, that's, hmm.

You talk about like, you know, while, this is kind of like there's always things going on, although right now it seems like it's a little bit like the pots boiling over and you keep teasing me about me and my comments on the silver wagon, you know, but I'm like, look at this thing. Like this, this is wild to watch. I don't know. Is it wild to watch what's going on in the markets right now? Your thoughts? Oh, it's very definitely wild because, I mean, the numbers are big green or they're big red, right?

So when you have those extreme moves, you're basically in the formation of either a major top or a major bottom, right? And those emails and those texts that I was sending you about silver, it's like, yeah, silver is a wagon. And that's a bandwagon, right? And sometimes people jump off that bandwagon a little early and sometimes they hand. on a little bit too long. Very few people get off the bandwagon at just the right time. But that's mass psychology, right? And so the fact is, is that everything is moving faster now. The benefit for our clients is that because our portfolio managers are really experienced pros, they're very stoic. They've got the time. They've had the training. And most importantly, they've got the temperament

for managing money, which is separating the signal from all the noise that's out there. But, you know, when I look at the world that you've been looking at, in particular, on the precious metal side of things, gold is down 4.38% as we speak here on Tuesday, March the 3rd, the silver ETF is down 7.54%. The uranium ETF is down 8.59. metals are down 6.94 and the broad ETF of Canadian gold miners is down 7.94% just in the day. And yesterday, which was the first market day after the beginning of the Beach Boys play in their song over Iran, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran, you know, first market day that that, that mark, first day the markets are open after that started, we thought that things might be a little bit rougher than they were. We thought that maybe gold would really spike to the upside. And as it

turned out, it had a muted move to the upside, but nothing big. Gold shares, which had been leading gold bullion recently and it just made new highs. They also made a new high, but they're getting clock today. Silver opened yesterday down about seven or eight percent and and finished down two or three percent yesterday. But, you know, we would have thought things might have been a little bit worse. Now, the price of oil, of course, has gone up really substantially. I mean, WTI went up, Western Canada Select went up with WTI. But the biggest increase, of course, was in Brent crude, because that's essentially the price that Europeans are paying for their crew. So sometimes major catastrophes are already priced into the market.

And sometimes they're not. Pardon me, one of the things that does happen is if major events start to unfold over a weekend, there's a little bit more, there's a little bit more emotion that dissipates before. the market's open again. But, you know, at the open, that's typically the first 90 minutes of each trading day are retail investors, self-managers, and people calling the broker and asking for a trade, whether it's to sell something or buy something. So that's the more emotional, less trained, less disciplined money. And the last 60 to 90 minutes of each trading day is the institutional buyers and sellers that are in the market. And retail money is not always dumb money,

but it's more emotional money. And institutional money is the more stoic, more seasoned. And I'll say a little bit a little bit more cold-hearted and just the fax ma'am kind of money that's making moves. So yeah, it's always interesting to watch the differences between the opening and the closing. that's for sure. Just on that, you said the institutional money usually makes their trades last 60 to 90 minutes. Did I, was that correct? Correct, yeah. What is this significance about the last 60 to 90 minutes?

It's basically that they let the emotion of the opening from retail investors dissipate. And they process any new information that's coming out during the day. And they make the decisions around what they want to be in overnight or, over the weekend, whether it's for a short-term or a long-term investment. And so they wait for most of the panic to dissipate, panic or panic buying in some cases. And they're just a whole lot more disciplined, and they have time on their side. When you say just the facts, right? Last 69 minutes, the institutional money is more, you know, less emotional,

stoic just about the facts. How on earth can they figure out the facts with everything going on right now? And, you know, like sometimes I feel like I just live in one giant sciop where it's just information overload. I assume there, you know, over your now close to 30 years, correct? Over, yeah, over 30. Apologies. You've probably come to rely on certain different people and outlets of like, okay, they've been

disseminating more regularly, stuff that makes sense or has bared fruit over the course of time. Is that what you, in times like this, you go back to that? Or is there, you know, when you just say just the facts, it's like, man, there's a lot going on. But maybe there's always been a lot going on. I don't know, Andrew. You've been staring at this a lot longer than I have. Sure. So one of the things we need to recognize is that talking heads in the financial media, that, the vast majority of them have self-interest. Okay. So a lot of them talk their book.

That's what, that's the expression that's used. So they're trying to promote their own stuff, whether it's going up or going down, depending on how they're positioned. But financial, financial journalism is, is essentially like financial pornography. It's not real, most of it. The fact is that there's, of the talking heads that you, would see on somewhere like BNM Bloomberg or CNBC or, you know, a similar type of outlet, 90% of those people are just there trying to promote their brand. And the producers at those

shows actually focus on people who are, whose narrative fits with the direction of the market on any given day. So what it does is it exacerbates the direction. So those producers all have lists of which portfolio managers, which analysts are, say, bullish on gold. And if gold's going up, they'll bring. They call them? They call them. And they bring them on their network. And if they have people who are bearish on gold and gold is going down that day, those

are the people they call. Now, they'll have one or two kind of contradictory analysts on there to provide some semblance of balance. but it's heavily overweighted on what the direction of the day is. So financial journalism is there to basically exacerbate your fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and to push the buttons of fear and greed. So just like the regular news media, if it bleeds, it leads, bad news is good copy, that whole thing.

That's what happens. So 90% of the people on there are just there because they want the exposure. About 5% of the people on there are influencers. And about 5% are just trying to tell you exactly what they think based on real analysis. Those are the people that tend to rise to the top. But in order to separate a lot of that stuff, you have to focus on one thing. Price. You can't trade or invest in narratives.

you can only buy or sell price. So one of the fathers of modern day technical analysis, who's died a few years ago, his name's Jim Dines. He wrote a number of classic market books, but the most important of them is understanding mass psychology. And one of the things that he's always emphasized is the fact that in investing,

price is the only objective truth, everything else's opinion. So separating signal from noise really comes down to watching what price patterns are, not paying attention or focusing on what people say. It's what people do with their money that matters. Right. So, and that shows up in price patterns. So I want to go back. Man, you just said a whole bunch of interesting things. Okay, so I want to go back to the TV stations, right? When they bring on their experts, if it's going up, they bring up somebody who's going to push greed. You said it.

I was writing it out, and I'm like, you're literally saying, so, and then when it's going down, it's somebody who's bearish because they want to push it lower. And I'm like, so that would be their goal then, is to push it higher and to push it lower. And if you're a financial investor, you're sitting back going, Oh, they're bringing this guy on. Does that actually work? Does that actually work to push the price lower or the price higher? And if you're investor, you're sitting back going, okay, they're trying to push it higher

or they're trying to push it lower. Does that make sense the way I'm asking that? Yeah. And I mean, those, the 90% of people who are on there talking, who are, they have a narrative that is in alignment with the direction of the day. They're not necessarily trying to do that. But of course, you got to remember that the most powerful thing, uh, about about humans is our is our ego right and our ability to fool ourselves will say but essentially what

people love to be able to say is see I was right and so because I was right about this you should trust me and the network can say see we're bringing to people who said this this was going to happen and it's happening and so what it does is it it very subtly builds this perception that these experts know what they're talking about all the time. They just happen to be the clock that's right part of the time. And the network features them at the right times. Okay. Then I'm going to bring in the mass psychology thought with you can't trade in narratives. So this has been on silver. Everybody at this point knows my fascination with silver. It was the cheapest metal to buy, well, probably not the cheapest. I'm sure Andrew can,

I mean between gold and silver. You know, and I'd listen to a bunch of different podcasts. I don't know what this was. Three, four years ago, probably when I first started listening to Armstrong specifically. And then I started getting into a few others and I'm like, what is going on? Oh, that kind of makes sense. You know, you add in the Bitcoin conversation. There's a whole bunch of different conversations going on in Sean's head at this time. And Silver just made a lot of sense to me. I'm like, oh, like the ratio, everything going on, you know, eventually it has to, it has to go up, in my opinion. Now, where we sit, I'm, I'm, I'm conflicted because I listen to a lot of, I don't know, now I'm, now I'm like, are they precious metals experts? Are they trying to

sell me something? Because that, that thought is, is now, it's always been there, but regardless, Andrew, I'm sitting here and I go, you know, what does Armstrong say? It doesn't trade on inflation. It trades on the instability of government, of trust in government. And I might be simplifying that. No, you're not, you're simplifying it, but it's a broad category. It's declining confidence in government. And so when you look at this, I go, everything going on in the world, I'm like, I don't, but maybe this is my own narrative built in. where I go, I just don't see it going down. Like, I don't see trust in government going up anywhere.

At any point, I see war literally going on in Iran. I don't know what else to call it. You're dropping bombs. And you got Russia, Ukraine should, I don't know, should have been done a couple of years ago maybe. I don't know. It's still there. You've got all these different conflicts that continue to be seeming to escalate, not de-escalate. And so I feel like, but to me, when you say you can't trade narratives, I'm like,

well, that's literally a narrative I have created, I think, and I'm curious your thoughts on that. So if you'll allow me, I'm going to, I hate this word, but it applies here. I'm going to unpack a few of the things that you said. So when you were listening to those podcasts, you know, a number of years ago before things in the precious metals market really started to take off, you were drinking upstream from the herd. And that's another expression from Jim Dines, drink upstream from the herd. Not downstream because you know why, right? Right. Because there's a lot of pollutants in that water.

So what happened since then is that you understood or you were fortunate enough to connect with Martin Armstrong, who we followed for a long time and I met him first in 1997. But you were fortunate enough and wise enough to pay attention to what he was. he was saying because he's all about kind of a cold analysis. There's understand or his computer is. And it's all about understanding that the fact that everything moves in cycles, everything moves in waves. But another thing happened to you along the way, which is confirmation bias, which is the same thing that the producers are doing when they're bringing on more people who say X or Y was going to go down and they bring them on. on the day that that X or Y is going down. So it feeds everybody's confirmation bias.

So, and the expression that Jim Dynes used was those inside the bubble cannot see the bubble. And so, you know, there are certainly people in the precious metals community. I would say not necessarily dealers. people buy and sell physical precious metals based on whatever they think is appropriate for themselves and where they think the price is going. And Nick and company, I've listened to him on your podcast numerous times. He's not a crazy precious metals bug.

They're very open. This is what we sell. And you should buy it in the proper proportion for yourselves, et cetera. But there are people who would be. referred to as gold bugs or silver bugs who think it's always the right time to buy, buy, and when things go down, you never sell them, you always hold, and when things go down, you always buy more. The reality is that there's a time to buy, there's a time to sell, and there's a time to do nothing. Precious metals are an asset like any other, like bonds,

like stocks, like real estate. You want to own them when they're going up. Now, what's happened during that same period that you're talking about for yourself and for a lot of the viewers in the podcast is that confidence in governments has declined and the decline has accelerated for very good reasons. Okay, let's be clear about that. So what happened as an example in late January would be kind of a, we refer to it as an interim high as part of a secular bullmark. So I don't for a moment think that the, the, that the, the, the, uh, the bull market in precious metals is done. I don't. And, uh, we've got a long way to go. Armstrong's been pretty clear that, that he sees silver going to at least 160 in US dollars. Um, there's a possibility that it

goes over 200 according to the Socrates models, but certain things have to happen along the way. and he sees $10,000 gold. But $10,000 gold is by 2032. So that's a little bit less or, yeah, it's basically a double from where we are today because gold's just above or right around $5,000 today. And in six years, well, that's a 12% compound return over that time period. So it's not as spectacular move as we've had the last few, the last few years. And just to pat ourselves on the back a little bit, we've had a lot of our, a lot of our clients come through the Money Talks channel. Obviously, that's been a channel that has a lot of people who believe in the commodity story,

in the, you know, the gold as a monetary asset and silver as both a monetary asset and an industrial asset, that kind of crowd. But, you know, we've been saying for, I don't know, seven or ten years that you should buy your physical gold and silver as insurance. And we invest in gold and silver stocks and bullion in the ETF form as investment. So you separate your insurance from your investment. And it's in 15 days, it'll be five years since we started this strategy that we call our core to explore commodity strategy. And it's, I mean, it's done better than we ever thought it would. It really has. As of the end of February, our one year number is at 69%. But our almost five year number is at over 24% compound return, which is nine and a half percent ahead of the benchmark that

we compare to, which is half the TSX and half the S&P 500. We don't expect that to continue, just to be really clear. And that's a small portion of clients' portfolios. It's generally between seven and 10% because it's much more aggressive. You know, higher, higher volatility. And, you know, we've had months when it's been down five or six percent, which is a big move down. We've also had months when it's up, you know, over 10%. But it's a bumpy ride and it shouldn't be all of a client's portfolio.

It's the explore part of core and explore. The core should be your, you know, your dividend paying stocks, your large cap growth stocks, you know, private alternatives, like in private debt and in real estate and in infrastructure and corporate bonds, not government bonds, corporate bonds. So just to be clear about that. Just on managing people's money, I don't know how to ask this question properly, but I'll give it a good shot. If people wanted to come across to you, is there a, I don't know, is it a floor?

Like, how much capital do they got to bring across to you in order to start managing it? Or can you just manage everyone's? Yeah, unfortunately, we can't manage everyone's because there's limited time in the day, right? And so we have, and it doesn't matter the size of a client portfolio, every client takes a certain amount of our bandwidth, which is time. managing the money itself is an easier part. We work with three discretionary firms, primarily one on the coast and two in the Toronto area. And they do the day-to-day portfolio management. And we have a lot of interactions with them on an ongoing basis.

I have two meetings today with portfolio managers and clients as an example. But typically the minimum we have for people over the age of 50 is 500,000. And that could be a combination of, you know, RSPs, TFSAs, pension funds, corporate money. We have a lot of clients who have corporations and they invest within either their operating company or their holding company. And under the age of 50, typically we're looking for for north of 250,000 and being active and robust savers. Or, you know, maybe they got stock options that are coming up or they're getting an inheritance or something like that. So we can't help everybody, but nobody can help everybody. So, you know, I have about 92 or 93 client families, something like that.

And my colleague who joined me coming up on seven years ago next week, he has right around 85 or 90 families as well. And we can, with our current business structure, we could each handle probably a maximum of 125. And if we add some staff, we might be able to get to 150 each. But with with with the way that that things really work, if you're going to do a complete wealth management plan and ongoing communication, regular reviews with a client, there's only so many hours in the day.

So there's, and that's very different compared to like being able to set what your, what your number of clients is. that's very different than being in a large firm where you've got a branch manager who's sitting over your shoulder and looking at, you know, how many of the leads, let's pick on the banks for a minute. Let's say you're with one of the bank brokerage firms. Most of your, most of your new prospective clients are referred up to you from the branch level because people exceed a certain amount of investment assets and, you know, they're instructed to refer them up the food chain in terms of expertise and sophistication and investment options. And so they look at, you know,

what's your conversion rate on those, on those families that are being referred to you within the bank chain and how much revenue are you generating for the dealership based on that? It's called the turn rate. So it used to be that in the world where commissions were the primary compensation of, say, a typical broker in an investment dealer. So good, bad or indifferent, the transaction is king. I think that's a conflict of interest model because that's just what's called churning. Okay. It's turning things over in the book for the sake of paying the broker's mortgage or the lease on their Lamborghini as opposed to what's best for the client. So back in 2000, I actually made a switch over to what's called fee-based. So we don't get paid on any transactions.

We're paid on the value of the client portfolio. And so I was in the first two or three percent in the industry in Canada to make that transition to a fee-based environment. Now, most of the industry is fee based, but the way that the branches, the branch managers and the corporations and the head offices in Toronto look at things is what's your turn rate, not your churn because it's not transaction commission based anymore. It's what's the average yield off the client assets. And we're right back to the same reason why I left a large dealership, which is, do you have a it in proprietary investments run by the institution that you work for because those have a 35 or 35 times higher profit margin for the financial institution than something that's offered by a third party. That's shocking, isn't it? That still exists. I don't even know what to say. I'm like,

oh my goodness. Sorry. Yeah. It's a lot. It's kind of like drinking water from a fire hose, if you're not familiar with the industry, but that's how the industry works. I don't know if I'm speaking for a chunk of my audience, a huge chunk of my audience, it's just, you know, when it comes to when it comes to finances, right? Managing ones, you know,

like savings and everything else. You know, like, I'm sure there are people sitting there going, 500 grand. I don't got 500 grand, 250 grand. I don't know, I don't get it. Whatever it is. But it's funny, I look at my own life and I'm like, I mean, I've just been, I feel like I lived under a rock.

I came out for it and then you started trying, you know, you got married, you had a kids, he bought a house, you're poor, and then you're just trying to find little things to try and get a little bit ahead, right?

And then, you know, different people coming in your life, you're like, oh, why are you doing that? Oh, that makes sense.

Oh, okay, why are you doing that? And Andrew, when you first contact me, and he started talking to it. I'm like, this is interesting because,

you know, like, most financial guys, I run into. Now, it isn't true anymore because of what I've been talking about and some of the guests I've had on. When I first started into those conversations, all of them looked at COVID roughly the same. All of them looked at, I'm sure if I brought up Alberta independence, maybe I'm wrong. I feel like they kind of look at the same. When you look at things going on in the world, they kind of have the CBC narrative, if you would. And then I keep running into people such as

yourself now that look at the world completely different. different or in my case similar, which is very interesting, right? So like, I'm sure the number for some people is not something that they have just sitting there. For others, I'm sure they do, because there are a lot of smart cats that listen to this that are smarter than me, who've been around for a lot longer, who are staring at the problems and they're just trying to get people to talk about it. So I guess it's a roundabout way of going to, like, it doesn't shock me that there are things with investments that are not on the up and up or there's ways for big financial institutions to maybe squeeze a bit more out than was originally led

to believe. It's trying to decouple ourselves, you know, like get up to speed with everything going on. And that for me has been, and I don't know, I don't know what I did in learning things up until about five years ago. But I was pretty surface level on a lot of stuff. So what you're talking about, yeah, there's a lot there. And I'm like, oh, man, I'm going to have to go home and chew on all this all over again. So there's, there are a lot of different kind of personality types in the world. But as it, as it relates to trusting the government or the mainstream narrative, there's generally three categories of people. There's the 20% who believe everything that the government or the newspaper or the mainstream news broadcast tells them.

There's roughly around 60% in the middle who can be swayed, but they're not sure. Some of them will investigate. Some of them won't. And then there's the 20% that I'm in. And maybe the numbers are a little bit different. But for the sake of argument, we'll call it 2060, 20. And basically when we hear something that comes out as an official narrative, we have an immediate distrust of mainstream narrative. And one of the first things that happened during COVID was I said, oh, crap, I feel like we're being managed.

And when you see how COVID, as an example, was used to scare the living daylights out of people, you know, don't go see your granny who's in a long-term care facility because you could kill her instead of her loving you for having come visit. And for people to stand this arbitrary six feet away from each other, it's like, this is just all made up. And I mean, I figured that out pretty early. You know, I think a lot of that came for my parents because they, you know, they survived the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War.

My dad was in the Dutch underground as a teenager. So it was effectively the youth underground. You know, it wasn't 25 years old, you know, sneaking around with a knife and slitting you know, Jerry's throats or anything like that. But he was part of this youth underground. And because communism was spreading all across Europe at the time, the resistance or the underground in the Netherlands was actually a communist youth group. So my dad learned very early on how brainwashing works, how, you know, narrative management works.

And he actually talked to the local parents. priest. My parents were Dutch Catholic. And at that time, the Catholic Church was still very anti-communist. And so my dad learned how this worked, and he went and he told the priest every week how things were working. And so the church at that time was also kind of resisting the communist influence that started out of socialism. And of course, we know that the Netherlands went so far. my parents brought that home to me or brought that over to Canada when they emigrated in 53 and you know all all my siblings and I are born in Canada but my parents brought those stories of almost starving to death in from the fall of 44 through the spring of 45 but also about how all of the

propaganda worked and so I guess genetically but also so by nature but also but also by nurture, when I see something that doesn't, it doesn't ring true, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm going to go research it and try and figure out what actually is the truth. And, you know, I, I form strong opinions, but I don't express them until I'm confident and it can bring, you know, research and data and proof to the table, right? There's a saying that you could tell a Dutchman, but you can't tell them much. but and we we certainly are strong willed i'll give you that but that's also how you can survive uh you know through through great hardship right so we're just germans with a better sense of

humor so it is interesting you know uh i got to interview um i'm forgetting now his name too that's terrible of me he's since past i got to go into an old folks home here in uh in town andra an interview a 95-year-old, let's say, man who was a part of that movement. And he talked, he told one story about a pastor being on the cattle train as they were getting moved and them singing and them dragging the pastor out and killing him. And he was rightfully so emotional about it. It's just those stories are quickly or are already.

gone and most of us don't recall them but having parents who live through part of it and the things that they're telling you, you know, to watch out for or instilling in you to watch for in one's country, you know, you look at Canada right now. I was saying this before we started, you know, like you just, you just had, well, I mean, we had the Cowichin decision and for those who listened to the podcast, we had Barry Kirkamon multiple times talking about the implications of what was happening there with the simple title. Now you have crater Metro Van, Vancouver and that going on with a new tribe. Yeah, the federal government basically ceding that land of the Muscoeum Nation.

Thank you. And, you know, okay, so you get that in BC and that idea is spreading. And if I use Barry Kirkham's logic over the next two to five years, we're not going to have a decision on from the courts as it's appealed. So it's going to be case law. So you're going to have more of that, not less of that. and then you have to decide for yourself if in two to five years they're going to come down with the hammer and say oh no that was wrong and and go backwards possible you've got here in alberta albert independence the petition being signed and in twenty six you're going to have a referendum you have out in quebec four straight by elections won by the quebec separatist party not to mention all the craziness with uh jail reform right the gladu uh principal gladu whatever it's I forget what the second part of that is, but regardless, letting people out early, the danger of society, immigration, all the things that are just piling up here in Canada. And then I hear, you know, I've got a guy who manages money.

And I go back to the first thing. How do you manage people's money in a Canada lake today? Very carefully. And with a lot of discipline, the webinar that we're presenting, it's going to be weak from when this, or sorry, six days from when this airs on Tuesday, March 10. 10th, we do three webinars, sometimes for a year. This one's called allocating capital or portfolio playbook amidst political uncertainty. So to use an example, I'll pull a metaphor from sports. I'll use football as the example. You have a playbook because you generally know the tendencies of what the offense and defense of the other of your opposing team, what their general tendencies are.

and you learn certain patterns in certain cycles. So you have a playbook and you have, so you have a general game plan and then you run plays, but even within the individual plays, if something happens that's different from what you expect, you have to respond in real time and take action. And sometimes what the opposing team does is actually effective in terms of going off pattern, so to speak,

or not as predicted. So you have to be able to react in real time. So that's why we use the analogy of the playbook. The way that we also like to describe what we do, regardless of which of our managers, is actually running the portfolio, as we call them forward-looking portfolios. So the structure is of a forward-looking portfolio

is that we have the reliable income generation part, which is the corporate bonds and some of the private alternatives, So private real estate, private debt, private equity, could have real estate and infrastructure, could have royalty streaming services as an example to produce a consistent income. Then you have stocks you can tolerate, which is going to be an overweight to dividend paying stocks because over time, stocks that grow their dividends consistently over time produce the highest long-term rate of return of all stocks and they have the lowest volatility. going to have some growth stocks in there, which is basically moving around to where the hot money is,

but in large cap stuff. And then we have what we consider the opportunity seeking portion, which is what that corn explore part that I just told you about a little earlier on with the commodity stuff. That's the stuff that's looking for a lot of alpha or outperformance, but it comes with a lot more beta, which is volatility compared to the market. So that's what we call our forward thinking portfolios. And we'll describe that in more detail in the webinar. The other thing, kind of an overarching theme, is that structure plus flexibility equals durability.

Right. You know that if you're not flexible in hockey and you get hit, you're more likely to be injured. If you have an airplane that is built very strong, but it's inflexible. it's vulnerable to turbulence. If you have a bridge that is not flexible along with being strong, it is at risk of actually collapsing. It becomes brittle, right, in, say, an earthquake or that type of situation. So structure plus flexibility equals durability.

And that's really what we're looking for. And it comes down to, again, separate. separating signal from noise and honestly being able to be more than a little bit stoic and just focus on price. And, you know, when Chicken Little is is selling things and running away from the fire, giving away the shares of great companies, we walk towards the fire and we buy them at a discount from Chicken Little who's running away. And when everyone else is buying, you know, we're happy to, we're happy to sell to them at an elevated price. So it's kind of doing the opposite of what the crowd is doing to get the best returns. You mentioned a webinar. Walk me through the webinar and how people can sign up if they're interested.

So they can visit our website. It's I-welf.com. That's i-dashwealth.ca, and I think you're going to put it in the show notes below as well. And you can just register for the webinar there. You have to scroll down from the top of the page, but it's just below the fold. So you just scroll past the opening graphics and stuff. And you'll get a registration link. It just have to put in your name and email address for us to send you the link and let you join the webinar when it happens.

We have a lot of people who will listen to the webinar afterwards, either because it's too hectic at that time of day, especially if they're in a time zone that's a little bit behind us, such as, say, Pacific time zone, and then we'll just be getting home from work or whatever, or they just want to wait until, you know, the morning after or the day after or whatever and watch it. And so even if you can't attend live, you can,

just sign up for the webinar and you'll get a link to the recording usually the same evening. And maybe you've answered this. I feel like the title of it actually does it. But if I was sitting there and I go, okay, I don't know, right, Andrew, you've said a lot of things that are pretty interesting. Okay, there's a webinar. Coming in, what should I expect to pull out of it? Like if I'm hopping in the webinar, is there something that, you know, like, you know what? This is what you're going to find when we do this? Well, I'll read you the agenda. Sure.

So we'll talk about the portfolio results. We'll talk what next element is as if there wasn't enough uncertainty. We'll go through some of the things that are attracting a lot of attention. And then we're going to talk about the key risks that we're actually watching. And we're actually going to talk about some of the positives that are out there that are getting less attention right now because the market is and, and particularly conservative-minded people are really risk-focused. And so they're like, these are all the bad things and they forget about the good things. And we'll talk about a little bit more on the commodity side of things,

why we think there's more room to run in the commodity super cycle. And talk about the structure of the portfolios themselves in a little bit more detail. And we're also going to tell people, show people what the big mistakes are to avoid, what not to do. That's at least as important as what you should do. So that's the way that we approach things. They generally last 60 to 70 minutes and then Q&A. We're trying to get them back to about an hour.

But as you know from doing long form podcasts, it's easy to focus on a particular subject longer than you intended at the beginning. But we do our best to try and keep it to just over an hour. And then we have 10 or 15 minutes usually of question and answer. And once again, if people wanted to sign up for that, they just go to your website, correct? Yep, I-welf.ca. And scroll down from the top of the homepage, and you'll see a registration link there. One final question for you.

You said when it comes to different things, there's buy, there's sell, and there's do nothing. On the old silver wagon right now, your thoughts. do nothing probably buying soon all right andrew appreciate you hopping on and doing this and uh well i look forward to uh if if if i'm sitting here hopefully maybe tuned into a webinar but regardless if i if i can't do that uh seeing you here in like what is it 20 some days at the cornerstone forum yeah we're looking forward to it we've got a uh we bought a table and uh we'll have a little booth there So if people want to stop by and say hi and find out a little bit more about what we do, we're happy to talk to them.

Awesome. Thanks, Andrew. And, well, I'm assuming chat soon, if nothing else, on the old Silverwagon and what it's doing. Yeah, and you'll get some text and emails for me, too. I'll be peppering you. Sounds good. Thank you, sir. Take care.