The Dividend Cafe - Happy Thanksgiving! - 2019

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

Thanksgiving is the one week of the year, where we bypass market commentary and economic analysis in the Dividend Café. It serves as a logical week to take a break from the Fed, global GDP growth, the trade war, earnings, and market valuations. And affirmatively, we should be doing a Thanksgiving edition of Dividend Café every week, because that is how much gratitude we have at The Bahnsen Group. Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, financial food for thought. And we are sending this out a little early because of the Thanksgiving holiday. The market is, by the way, open half day on Friday, which is a sort of sadistic and bizarre act of Congress that manipulates not only our holiday scheduling generally, but the way markets will function for a few hours on a Friday. But I don't expect any of you are going to be paying attention to markets over the weekend. So we just thought we would use this kind of entrance into the long weekend, one of the great weekends in the American calendar, celebration of Thanksgiving to kind of say a couple words to you. I've tried to do this most years and frankly, it's fun for me to do because there are so many things throughout the year that we would never use in Dividend Cafe to say that we're thankful for. I'm not going to call out the people on my team or some of the various clients and partners and vendors and all the stuff that we work with during the weekly Dividend Cafe that we're trying to dive into markets and give analysis and give ideas and so forth. That's really the function of this week by week. But it is nice to take a breath

and be able to comment on those things that we have tremendous amount of gratitude for. Our business is no exception. We are a growing company that is really, frankly, humbled and overwhelmed by the support that we've had from our clients, by the confidence that our clients give to us. And we're extremely blessed by those who we work with to help create the experience for clients that we create. Starting with myself, I will say, as the managing partner and the founder of this firm, I'm incredibly grateful for the people I come into the office with each and every day. Obviously, the people I work most directly with, my executive assistant, Kelsey, works out of our New York office, the investment committee that I'm intertwined with all day,

every day, making portfolio decisions. I think Julian and Daya and Brian and Robert are incredible people to work with. But when you look at the client experience that we're giving, the leadership that comes from our managing directors, both Don and Kimberly are just absolutely phenomenal additions to the leadership team here at the company. And we look at the partnership that we have. It's a really tight group. And I've learned a lot from Trevor. I hope you listen to his Thoughts on Money podcast, read his Thoughts on Money blog.

He's an incredible thought leader. This year, we had Sean join our private wealth advisor group, and he's brought a lot to the table. And of course, we welcomed just a couple months ago, Jeff Gregory, who's our director of investment banking and a significant advisor in our team. Jeff with over 30 years of professional experience, not just for what he can do for clients, not just for what he represents to our business, but as a person, he's just really been a wonderful guy to get to know. And so I look across the partnership, the advisor base,

and I just am humbled by the fact that I would not have the business that I have if it were not for the wonderful people that I've been blessed to work alongside. And yet at the same time, it's not just those who have equity ownership at the Bonson Group or that are themselves folks that you as clients know, our advisory team. I think the various departments we have are filled with total professionals, total servant leaders, and people that I've worked with now for many years that I think I'm going to work with for many more years to come. And so our service and operations group, I'm very grateful for Jackie O'Hare, has been that director since we started the Bonson Group

and has led it into just an incredibly resourced and efficient group for delivering that kind of operational service that clients need day by day. that kind of operational service that clients need day by day. The team she's built around herself with Alexis and Camille and Beth are really professionals. The strategy and communications group, you know them more than you think you may know them because if you're watching the podcast, watching videos, reading the blogs, the articles, the white papers, seeing media appearances that get curated into our various distribution mechanisms, whether it's social media or our website. None of that stuff just happens. It takes a lot of work, and I'm thankful to Brian and Glenn for all their efforts.

And we look forward to continuing to try to utilize thought leadership and content creation as a way that we better serve our clients. I've said this for a long time and they've caught that vision early on. I view all of this work we do as our moral responsibility as fiduciaries to provide thought leadership that helps guide clients, that is substantive, that is real, and that helps reinforce your confidence and faith in us so that when we go through trying periods as investors, you have kind of built up a fortress and we utilize the whole communications platform of our business to help do that. Certainly our traders, our analysts, it's become a very impressive part of our group. We look forward to welcoming a new addition to the team. I'll leave you in suspense on in a couple weeks.

But Daya and Julian, our Director of Equity Research, and then Kenny has been with us now a couple years. These are just absolutely incredibly thoughtful, smart guys that are all working towards creating a better analytical environment, better solutions, due diligence around investment ideas, and also execution, trading, just that investment infrastructure so necessary to what we deliver to clients. I mentioned my assistant, Kelsey, my own wife, Jolene, who has been with us now for a couple of years, trying to drive client experience, more thoughtfulness around our branding and our special events. She's as good as they come. And our office manager, Erica, who's just really delivered, I think, a tremendously professional environment for clients to come visit and for us to work in day by day.

So gosh, I sure hope I'm not forgetting anyone. That's one thing that's really tricky about the business having grown so much is that sometimes I find myself, I still know everybody's name though, and I'll keep it that way. We'll never grow to a point where I can't say everybody's name. I have a wonderful team. The Bonson Group is a family, say everybody's name. I have a wonderful team. The Bonson Group is a family and we hope that you find the service we're giving you to meet that kind of criteria that we have and those standards that we expect of ourselves. Extraordinary standards if I do say so myself. There are others that play a big role in what we do. I'm not going to go through all the different money managers, but I think a lot of you know that we do not invest client capital with asset managers that we can't build a relationship with, that I can't sit across the desk from, across the table from, and get to know their actual decision makers personally.

Hedge funds, private equity, fixed income managers. We desire a very close relationship with so we can make sure there's compatibility and trust in who we're investing our client capital with. You steward it to us and we have to steward it well with others. So we're very grateful for the partnerships we have with all these different companies. You know, there is this company in Chicago by the name of Hightower that we utilize very heavily in our supervision, back office, technology. I joke with them about this, but it's kind of true. They're doing all the things that we don't want to do. Our clients don't care about how our networks are plugged in and some of these kind of red tape things.

But those things have to be done for us to run an efficient business. And we're very grateful for our partnership with Hightower to help us do what we do in our business, which is serving clients. So I could go on and on. But the thing I want to close with, even beyond the clients that we are so grateful for, for their years of patronage and continued opportunity to come alongside them, and continued opportunity to come alongside them, serve them, help facilitate their financial goals, hear their stories. I am a sucker for entrepreneurial success. There's something about hearing and preserving and playing a role to some degree in the tales of how people have built better lives for themselves and their family that I absolutely love. And I get to do it every single day with this career that I am blessed to have. Beyond the team, beyond some of the outside vendors and partners we work with,

I'm incredibly grateful to live in a country that rewards free enterprise, that gives us an ability to participate in free enterprise by investing alongside it in debt and equity capital markets, that enables us to have the freedom to run a business, to give advice to people, to run a profitable business with clients who themselves have achieved monetary rewards that need cultivation, preservation, counsel, advice, transfer, all kinds of different verbs that go along with one's own affluence. It's created not only a career that I'm so blessed with and a business. But the entire ecosystem comes down to the DNA of the country

that we live in, where free enterprise and material prosperity are rewarded, are celebrated, are thought of as aspirational. And it's something that I don't ever want to take for granted. I recognize how many places in the world that isn't true. And so when we established Thanksgiving as a country, as a national holiday, we did it because we had a lot to be thankful for. We have a lot of abundance in this country. And I'm grateful for that religious freedom, that economic liberty. And I'm thankful that we all are. Those of you watching this, listening to this right now, and me saying it, we are all beneficiaries of that entire experiment that our founding fathers designed. It is integral to the investment markets we work in every day and integral to why I say to you, happy Thanksgiving.

Thanks for listening to Divin Cafe, the special Thanksgiving message. Enjoy your holiday with your family. We'll come back to boring stuff like the Fed next week. Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you for listening to the Divid Securities are offered through Hightower Securities LLC. Advisory services are offered through Hightower Advisors LLC. This is not an offer to buy or sell securities. No investment process is free of risk and there's no guarantee that the investment process or the investment opportunities referenced herein will be profitable. Past performance is not indicative of current or future performance. This is not a guarantee. The investment opportunities referenced herein may not be suitable for all investors. All data and information referenced

herein are from sources believed to be reliable. Any opinion, news, research, analyses, prices, or other information contained in this research is provided as general market commentary. It does not constitute investment advice. The team at Hightower should not be in any way liable for claims and make no express or implied representations or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of the data and other information or for statements or errors contained in or omissions from the obtained data and information reference herein. The data and information are provided as of the date referenced. Such data and information are subject to change without notice. This document was created for informational purposes only.

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