The Dividend Cafe - A Father's Day Dividend Cafe

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

• There is a solution of the problem of always having a reason to sell, and always having a reason to buy: It is – always having a plan … • The nation’s debt is talked about as much any topic in the political/economic sphere, but rarely talked about with any real practical sense of what the eventual possible outcomes actually look like. Today we provide five crystalized options for what eventually comes of America’s national debt. This is crucially important for people who care about their kids and grandkids, and people who don’t. • The “financialization” of the American economy is happening right before our eyes, and it is a major consequence of the monetary regime in which we live. It needs to be understood – the good, bad, and ugly. • Why inflationary efforts are creating more deflation – an economic primer you will love, and your college professors never gave (or got themselves) • Proof that dividend growth requires active management, and that passively trying to get it will ensure you lose it • Small-cap investing is very promising coming out of recessions, and if you think dividend growth needs active management, you should see the data in small-cap! • The economy is picking back up – but wow does it have a lot of work to do. Check out the updated data from air travel, restaurant reservations, retail shopping, and more. And then, check out what really, really matters – business investment. Some investors are focusing on mall traffic in Q2 of 2020. We are focusing on industrial production in Q1 of 2021. • The Chart of the Week tells you why the market keeps embarrassing not just bears, but those who don’t understand how markets work • And in Politics & Money, look at worst news imaginable for President Trump, and the best news imaginable … all at once. It’s an action packed Dividend Cafe, so jump on in … There is no U.S. Open to watch, so you really have no excuse. Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Well hello and welcome to this week's Dividend Cafe, both those of you listening on the podcast and watching on the video. We have a special edition this week, it's special in the sense that it's kind of long and I have printed here in my hand the written DividendCafe.com because I say it all the time and never do it, but I'm like determined to let you listeners get the full enchilada this week of everything I talk about in the written commentary. It's also special because it's Father's Day weekend and I won't repeat or

rehash all the sentiments of the commentary to this effect, other than to just say that I do wish all of you dads Happy Father's Day. And I think that it's one of those uh you know two-way uh holidays and how we take it you know because we we have our own dads to honor and then many of us are dads and so uh there's that that uh you know connection with our own kids and then connection with the generation above and and uh and the comment i was i was focusing on was how you know i'm just so used to watching golf on Father's Day weekend and that U.S. Open being Sunday. And so the U.S. Open is not here this year. Oftentimes the NBA Finals has been running through Father's Day weekend, and that's not here. And yet both of those things are coming back.

And yet my own father has been passed away 25 years now is not. And I think that there's this sort of reflection, you know, that's always healthy, particularly for those, which I think is most of you. But in my case, certainly very blessed to have had a wonderful relationship with my dad. And so it's a good weekend to reflect and be grateful. my dad. And so it's a good weekend to reflect and be grateful. And also grateful for being a father and the kids that I'm trying to bring up. And so hopefully we do have things to look forward to. Out of this Father's Day weekend, we are already over the last several weeks, we're experiencing the joys of an economy that is beginning to reopen. Certain pockets of the country more so than others and certain areas within those pockets more so than others. But we can feel it coming and it's good and hopefully will continue.

Apart from the investor impact, apart from the economic impact, just some return to normalcy and some return to the things in our life that we often take for granted. And so here we are. And the Dividend Cafe this week is going to go through a lot of things that I think are pertinent. There actually is a whole section I'm going to talk about regarding the state of the economy and some of the data that's out there. And I want to try to churn or pivot a little bit into what I think is a particular area that is not as headline-oriented, not as media-savvy.

Media and savvy these days don't belong in the same sentence, but it's not noteworthy to the media because it isn't a real headline-grabbing kind of a category. But I'm going to talk about that in a moment, so I'll hold you in suspense. First and foremost, I think one of the things going on in the market right now, the market was up most days this week. I'm recording the middle of the day Friday and we were up 300 points, then we went down 200 points. And then as I'm recording, we're flat and we were up, you know, a pretty fair amount most days coming into this week. A lot of it was triggered by being down 800 points Monday and then closing up 200. So you had this 1,000-point reversal.

So as we sit, let's say we're going to end up the week up somewhere between 500 and 1,000 points, something like that. It's a big week, particularly from that low spot Monday. Last week was down over 1,000 points. It had a particularly horrific day in the middle of it. And the week before was up, you know, huge. So we have this volatility still. And I talk about it all the time.

But one of the things where if you want to think about the environment we're in right now as that we're in low volatility, high volatility, you know, good opportunity, bad opportunity, whatever you think is happening in the market, high volatility, good opportunity, bad opportunity, whatever you think is happening in the market, I will promise you that someone can sit down and tell you a bunch of reasons to be out of equities and they're going to be right in the sense that there's these bad things one has to be concerned about. And someone can sit here and make a case to you, oh, you want to be in equities, and they're going to be right. I mean, they may make bad arguments to make it, but there are good arguments. You know, right now, one could certainly argue we have economic

uncertainty in front of us coming out of this COVID-induced recovery, the shutdowns going into recovery. And some could argue that the Fed and the monetary stimulus is a game changer into how it reprices risk assets. That's most certainly accurate. Some could argue that there are very few periods where risk assets do not perform well when there's all this liquidity sloshing around looking for a home. Someone could argue there's almost $4 trillion of cash on the sideline looking to be optimized. All that's true. And so the point I would make is that let's say we're sitting here at Dow 26 or 27,000. And a few months ago, we were sitting here at Dow 18, 19, 20,000.

There were arguments then someone could have made to be out of equities. And there were arguments then someone could have made to get in equities. And there are arguments now the same. And just like then going forward, where we are now going forward, then people will be able to say three months later, six months later, oh, I coulda, woulda, shoulda. And the coulda, woulda, shouldas are not going to be invalidated or invalidated based on the arguments that were made at the time. Those arguments are legitimate. The problem is that they're not conclusive because financial planning doesn't involve

things that are themselves conclusive in the present moment. They only become conclusive with hindsight. This is a refresher on one of the most basic of basics in the investing world, that the whole reason one asset allocates and goes 60% in equities as opposed to 93% or goes 40% as opposed to 20% or goes 20 instead of 53 or whatever the numbers are and how they get set based on one's view of the world, one's liquidity profile, one's tolerance for up and down movement, all of the factors that get baked in the asset allocation. That's the whole reason one does a plan.

Because when you have a plan that allows for the risks and opportunities that are there at Dow 20,000, as well as the risks and opportunities that are there at Dow 30,000, you don't have to sit there and live your life trying to flip a coin as to what newsletter writer is correct when the Dow's at 20 or when the Dow's at 30 or what pundit on TV is right or whatever headline on media is right. You actually have something more substantive that has optionality in the way it will treat your portfolio and how it will sustain your pursuit of financial goals. Now, when I think to the longer term issues that linger out in our economy and issues that I think will most certainly impact the way we are allocating client portfolios over time, and also it's becoming one that more intelligently gets presented to me too by clients who have questions about it. There's always things

that clients will ask about, some of which I think are old news, some of which I do not think are market impactful, some of which I think everyone knows about. Every now and then someone brings something up that no one would know about, and those are kind of those events that always had the potential to become black swan events. But there is this area that has tremendous import, not only to us as investors, but to all citizens of the United States of America, and that is our debt status, our long-term debt trajectory. And yet this is the thing that I believe has to get through your mind. Saying the long-term debt of the United States is unsustainable, our trajectory of growing our

debt is unsustainable, is totally unhelpful. It's, by the way, totally true as it goes. You hear people in Congress say it all the time. But from an investor or economic standpoint, the reality is that the lack of specificity when someone says the debt's going to blow up in our face, we're leaving our kids a mess, it's unhelpful, even though it's accurate. And I think it sort of creates this idea that there's this kind of point in time out there where all of a sudden you have this sort of like explosion, this kind of cataclysmic event and where all of a sudden we're living in like this alien dark world or something. And so then, because most people don't take that kind of sci-fi approach to the future debt implosion seriously, it causes them not to take the debt itself

seriously. But see, I actually believe it is a big deal. And I think there are a few options out into the future. They're not real simple. It isn't like you just get a menu and you order one off the menu, as we've seen in Europe, and frankly, as we've seen in the United States. The people that come out and say, here's what the problem is, and here's how it's going to go, they have an inevitable discrediting coming to them, because these things are so complex, so untimable, so nuanced, have so many variances around them, that there's no way to fully get that right and peg it. What we do know is that having what's getting close to $25 trillion

national debt with $1 to $2 trillion being added to it, it's going to be more than that here in the COVID year, as I'm sure you know, that feels unsustainable to people because it is unsustainable. And I can say things like, well, we can keep doing it as long as the bond market lets us, and I can be right, but I don't think people know what this means. I don't think they have a kind of construct to think about what it means into the future. How do we, in fact, sort of deal with what we intuitively believe represents a tremendous cloud hanging over the American economy and the American country for that matter. So what I will say to you is that there's the option that we grow our way out of it,

you know, productivity, corporate profits generates higher revenue, and we just keep growing rapidly and get the right pro-growth policies. rapidly and get the right pro-growth policies. And then through time, growth-oriented solutions enable us to kind of work our way down and manage it on the way. That's certainly been what a lot of people have hoped for for years. It most certainly was obtainable or doable. But I think most people have determined that that's not going to happen, that we're not going to go down that path. Then the second option is that we cut our way out of it, just pure austerity, entitlement reform, budget discipline. Now, if you think growing your way out of it is unsustainable, then cutting your way out of it is laughable. There is no precedent for a country that takes a lot of politicians telling them we're cutting this benefit, we're raising these taxes, we're cutting this spending.

Really, the only way even number one would work is in tandem with something like number two. And both number one and number two seem to be totally unsustainable and at least at a level that would be necessary to fully do what needs to be done. necessary to fully do what needs to be done. Now, number three is that just in theory, we could just flat out cancel some of the debt or pursue debt forgiveness, just kind of default on our own debt. It's the worst of the options. It would more or less mean we'd be cut off from debt markets into the future. If we weren't cut off, it would certainly mean that we'd be borrowing at ridiculously high prices, it would be destabilizing, it would be depressionary. And also, you have to keep in mind that we do technically, you know, have this thing called the US dollar, which is

the reserve currency of the world. So as Hamilton taught us in the late 18th century, the United States not making good on its debts has got to be considered not considerable. And yet, in theory, that option's out there. Number four is what I would call the full-blown Japan option, which is basically the Fed buying the debt. There's varying degrees of what it could look like. So this makes it a little more complicated because there's sub options under the Japanification option. This is, by the way, if I had to bet right now, where I think we are headed, some version of a Japanification.

But enabling ongoing borrowing, which is what the Fed's doing now, is different than monetizing legacy debt. They could do one. They could do both. I don't believe that they'll do neither, though. I think that that is out there and based on how it has gone in Japan and the unattractiveness of other options, I suspect some version of that is where we're headed. Then, of course, you're hearing more and more about this concept of modern monetary theory. Most people don't really understand what it is. They think it's just simply some kind of magic thing where you print enough money. It's more complicated than that.

The mechanics matter. The actual mechanisms matter. There's a reason why what we're doing right now is not MMT, even though there's some similarities when a Fed's running massive balance sheets. But again, the Fed is not monetizing that debt as long as they have the ability to sell the bonds they bought back into the marketplace, right? They're not paying for the debt with permanent capital. And so they're impacting interest rates and they're impacting the ability to borrow and they're providing liquidity and they are serving as a buyer with money that doesn't exist. But it is not the actual central bank buying the debt, which would be more MMT-like. So there are differences between the Japanification option and the MMT option.

between the Japanification option and the MMT option, some might think that those differences are very slight, but it's important to have the right categorization. So I guess what I would get to is rather than view some future where we have just kind of no access out of our ATM machines in a wasteland of existence. I think that there are economic processes and outcomes that probably have nothing to do with a point in time, but become a kind of embedded reality, sometimes over many years. And that's how we need to be thinking about the debt. need to be thinking about the debt. The bad part comes either from inflation, and they have not been successful, by the way, in trying to inflate away the debt, or in deflation, which I think most of you listening know is my belief, that they end up going a Japanification route and suppress growth to a point that the deflation ends up holding down our productivity,

which A, adds to the debt because they're not generating the revenues necessary, but B, rewards one part of society, those with assets, and hurts others to go down the route of debt forgiveness that would take away access to debt capital. That would be a decline in services the government could offer, potentially a decline in entitlements. There's political options that just aren't very sensible. Now, is number one and number two still out there? It has to be on the list, okay? Because it certainly could happen. If they could just wave a wand and implement a really radically pro-growth economic agenda and have consensus to get it done, and then have this

really aggressive cost-cutting endeavor over a decade, then I still, until some point in time where it is too late, it isn't too late. But I don't rule out one and two or a combination thereof because it can't be done. I rule it out because I think it won't be done, okay? So let me move forward from this. The new word that I have been using. I stole from my friend John Malden, Japanification. And there's another term that I think is accompanying this, but I didn't steal it from him. I've been using it a lot and it's called financialization. And this is important for investors because this is now we get to not one of the options for debt payoff, but we get to one of the consequences. And this is where I think it has impact to investors that we can see much of the impact in a positive way,

and yet impact to the society that has a negative connotation. And I want us to understand how both those things are true at once. Financialization is sort of a necessary consequence, probably not a desirable one by the Fed, but one they're willing to live with in the type of economy that the Fed is embarking upon. And what I mean by financialization is that rather than a spirit of productive economic behavior, a lot of decisions get made simply out of financial deck chair movement. Cheap money, heavy liquidity from zero interest rates, quantitative easing, that the engines of markets are not themselves. Companies maybe that shouldn't survive do. Companies end up not getting started or not making the investments in certain long-term

projects. Decisions, short-term versus long-term, surviving versus thriving, it's altered. There's distortion. And financial management ends up trumping operational performance. That's what I mean by financialization. And so just like the suppressed growth I described out of Japanification, this has a bad to it. Primarily, I think one of the great examples for stock market investors is you get companies that in a world of excess liquidity and low cost of capital decide to buy their competitors instead of beat their competitors. I'm not saying all M&A is bad. I think some M&A is really synergistic and really strategic. But my point being that the mentality of financialization is something different than

productive and operative performance. And we all, as believers in free enterprise and believers in the radical capabilities of the human spirit, would rather see productive and operative performance than financial performance. Financial performance ought to flow out of operative performance, not be itself the end, the end unto itself, if you know what I mean. So as a basic rule of thought, the more excessive debt you have, the more unto itself, if you know what I mean. So as a basic rule of thought, the more excessive debt you have, the more Fed intervention, and the more Fed intervention, the more financialization. So the inverse of that, if you had less Fed intervention, I think you'd have more productive and operative performance. So if we got that outcome, I think the winners would be all of us, the whole society, more

optimization in the economy. And shareholders do well with optimization. But without it in the financialization model, the whole society doesn't benefit, but shareholders do. You follow me? This is sort of the dilemma that we're up against. Now, I'm not going to go invest based on what I do not believe is going to happen. I got to invest based on what I think is going to happen. And I don't believe that there's any

other option. But I do think it's important that we understand those distinctions. Okay, I'm going a bit long here, but I'm going to keep it going. The inflation deflation discussion is intertwined with what I've been talking about. It has a lot to do with debt and most certainly with Fed intervention. But at its core, the kind of economic lesson that people have to understand is that Fed activities dealing with the supply of money cannot and do not impact the demand for money, which in other ways saying it is the demand for credit. So by the Fed buying a whole lot of bonds when money doesn't exist and depositing that excess on the balance sheets of banks as excess reserves, that doesn't get the money circulated into the economy. It increases money supply, but is basically held on shelves.

And that cannot become inflationary without a velocity of the money. Velocity comes from greater demand for goods and services. Greater demand for goods and services comes from organic, healthy, operative, sound familiar? Productive economic thought, economic aspiration, economic decision making. So you can get more money stock, but unless demand joins that supply, then you sit with asset prices inflating, but credit growth constricted because of a lack of organic demand stuck in a cycle of deflation. Now, I'm not arrogant enough to say that there's no scenario by which the Fed putting this money out on the shelves does not ever get into the real economy, that it simply can't be done. I do believe that, okay? But I'm not saying

it can't be done. I'm saying it hasn't been done. There's no precedent for it. Out of the great financial crisis, it didn't happen. Out of Japan and Europe and United Kingdom, it hasn't happened. Now, I guess you have to look at this Main Street lending facility and say, does this have a real economy dynamic to it? Does the Fed intervening in this sense with a monetary tool end up creating a real economy tool that actually stokes economic activity? that actually stokes economic activity. Again, for that to turn into an inflationary phenomena, an awful lot of things have to happen. And so we continue to monitor all of this, but land firmly on the side of history that what the Fed can do in increasing liquidity and stabilizing financial markets and being a lender of last resort in catastrophes. Those are all things that do not play in to what they can't do,

which is generate demand for goods and services in the economy. I got a big kick, by the way, out of a report I read this morning from a major financial Wall Street firm where I used to be employed that said they were starting to question if the Fed has abandoned its focus on financial market stability and has instead embraced a willingness to tolerate asset bubbles in the service of full employment goals. So I will just break the news for them. They have. Okay. I think they have for decades. And I don't think that they do that unknowingly, unwillingly. I think that it's a willingness to tolerate asset bubbles because philosophically they believe that that option is better than the alternative, which would assure higher unemployment.

And I don't happen to believe they're right. others not seeing through the tea leaves of the Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen, Powell era, that there is a prioritization that lends itself to the seriousness by which they take protecting employment via protecting asset markets via willingness to tolerate asset bubbles. This is a mentality in the central bank. It can be criticized. It can be criticized holistically or it can be criticized partially. I'd probably be in that camp.

But I don't think there's any point in pretending it doesn't exist. Okay, so I'm going to just keep us moving along here. There's a chart at dividendcafe.com today that shows 60 companies that have cut their dividend in the S&P 500 so far. shows 60 companies that have cut their dividend in the S&P 500 so far. And the reason I bring it up is I just want to reiterate before I move on that dividend growth is not something we've ever seen that can be done passively, that can be done by indexing, that can be done as set and forget, that it requires active management because of cyclical changes in companies, because of cyclical changes in the economy, because of extrinsic circumstances. So our commitment to continuing to grow the dividends from the companies that we buy on behalf of clients

is a commitment that is not going away and is a commitment that we understand requires active participation. And as people relying on the income of, let's say, the S&P 500, or by the way, even the income of a dividend-oriented passive strategy that itself is very vulnerable because it's based on backward-looking understanding of dividends instead of forward-looking understanding. The chart speaks for itself. A lot of conversation about small-cap investing. I'm actually very sympathetic. We did a podcast with our whole investment committee a couple weeks ago. I do agree with the historical reality that small cap has outperformed large cap. Companies,

let's call it under $5 billion in market cap versus companies of a larger capitalization coming out of recessions. And I have a chart at Diven Cafe showing that six months out after a market bottom, whether it was 1982, 87, 92, we look back over all these bear markets and the small cap sector to outperform large cap by quite a good amount. And I think that's accurate. And I think there's reasons for it. It isn't just the historical coincidence of the calendar. But again, to make another point in opposition to a philosophy

of passivity and a philosophy of indexing, we also have a chart that shows you that right now, 42% of the companies in the Russell 2000, the small cap index, do not make money. They lose money. They're nonprofit-making enterprises. That doesn't mean the stock price is necessarily going lower. A bunch of them obviously will, but it does very much mean that an index filled with companies that might is no way to get passive exposure to small cap without buying a lot of good companies and a lot of bad companies on one basket. And we think that an active approach involves the potential for human fallibility, but at least provides some active judgment that can help discern where opportunity lies. There is, I honestly think, one of the most interesting charts we've ever done at Dividend Cafe around market volatility, where we show the biggest down days of the last 100 years

and the biggest up days. And I want people to understand just how unbelievably volatile this has been here through this COVID moment. When you look to – if you just take out the Great Depression, financial crisis, Black Monday, then all you're left with is COVID. I mean as far as like the top 25 biggest down days and 25 biggest up days, they've all come basically from either this COVID experience or the financial crisis or Great Depression. And then you have that one day of Black Monday, which still represents the biggest percentage down day in history. But the third worst day ever came on March 16th of this year, and it barely missed being the second worst day, which was the great crash of the Great Depression. And the second worst day, which was the great crash of the Great

Depression. And the other worst day, which was Black Monday. And then the sixth worst day just was four days before that. And then a few days before that, another one that made the top 25. And then you also, by the way, had two of the biggest up days in history through the COVID moment as that kind of violent upswing and downswing was taking place. So the extreme days speak for themselves. I think everybody knows that. I think that historical reminder is helpful to understand. But here's the part I'd say that's more relevant and maybe less severe. and maybe less severe, 33% of all days so far this year, the market's been up or down over 2%.

So that kind of ongoing severe volatility may not be the 9% days and the 7% days. Those are brutal. But even having such a regular daily occurrence of up and down over 2% days is not only speaks to the just complete insanity of trying to trade and time one's way in and out, but also speaks to the challenges that are embedded in being a risk asset investor right now and the wisdom of having a plan. If that sounds like a theme, it's because it is. A theme of dividend growth, a plan of behavioral commitment to the plan. These are the things that we think the moment right now is screaming for. In terms of a couple parting thoughts and we'll move on, I am very committed right now to the idea of studying the economy throughout the recovery to get an idea where opportunity lies, where risk lies, what it's telling us, where the market's going. The market went up in advance of the economy beginning to turn because the market was pricing in ahead of time what it knew to be the case, that 30 million unemployed was a temporary consequence of the severe policy action and not a new normal.

But how long airlines would be shut down, how long restaurants would be shut down, how long malls would be shut down? Those things were somewhat unknown. And so now we can look at the charts and see, okay, daily travelers as registered by TSA traffic was down 99% and now it's down 83%. Okay. So that's a meaningful move, but it's still way down. So you get both things at once, much better, still bad. Open tables, reservation tracking in an index of the major US cities, some of which have really, really opened up, some of which have barely opened up. You see, again, down 100% in the

peak COVID moment, now down something around 70%. So a lot of improvement, still a lot of work to do. The big number that people liked this week, retail sales and food services. That number obviously had just completely collapsed. Then it had a big rebound higher, more than double what consensus expectations were. higher, more than double what consensus expectations were. And so again, this is the consumer category that you expect we're going to see improvement in. But then I put two other charts at Dividend Cafe that are not airline, hotel, retail, restaurants, some of the kind of more expected categories of consumer activity. The industrial production index, which dropped dramatically and has just picked up a tiny bit.

The capacity utilization, the percent of capacity that we're running at dropped from roughly 78% to 64%. Now it's ticked up to 65%. Both industrial production categories went way down and have just come up a little bit. And the point I want to make is that if you want to know how the economy is going to be doing in the middle of 2021, these are the departments that I would be studying. Business investment, capital expenditures, industrial production, an online resumption of the supply side of the economy. That's where you're going to see organic growth and sustainable health. sustainable health. There are obviously going to be fluctuations and concerns about the more traditional numbers. The unemployment number matters because it's so integral to human dignity and human activity. And yet in terms of getting a feel for forward-looking market understandings,

we're going to be following the business investment categories that go there with even more than the kind of retail-oriented, consumer-driven data points. And the politics and money side, I will just leave you with this. Re-elections have been pretty much 100% correlated for a first-term presidency for 100 years with if there was a recession, then they didn't get reelected. And if there wasn't a recession, they did. However, I will say this, that's not me making a prediction President Trump won't get reelected because I do believe that there's always the possibility of an outlier when the cause of the recession was unique around this COVID moment and the fact that one would presume

the GDP recovery will be surging dramatically at the time that voters are kind of formulating those opinions. So one can make an argument either way that the recovery from this recession could end up being an opportunity for President Trump. And then the mere existence of all the financial hardship right now could seal his doom. I am sympathetic to the argument that history is clear, but I'm also sympathetic to the argument that this time could be different. Both sides have to be considered. But as far as all the ramifications of this whole entire presidential consideration, the election and so forth, I am going to write a pretty significant white paper going into early July that by mid-July we want to get out to you just to offer a lot of history and a lot of perspective so that people can formulate the right perspective about the market, the economy, as we go into the November period. With that said, thank you all for bearing with this longer Dividend Cafe.

I hope you got something out of it. We cover a lot of categories, particularly that recap of various options of the future debt. All of these topics are near and dear to my heart. But I welcome any questions you have. We're all here for you. Reach out to your advisor. And in the meantime, have a happy Father's Day weekend. And thank you for listening to, thank you for reviewing, thank you for sharing and forwarding and rating so highly your experience at either our YouTube or podcast of the Dividend Cafe. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with Hightower Securities LLC, member FINRA and SIPC, with Hightower Advisors LLC, a registered investment

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