Tag: systematic-investing

As parents (myself included) apprehensively sent their kids back into the classroom for another pandemic-influenced school year, it put me in the mood to chip away at my own reading list, a collection of research papers that had accumulated in the “to read” folder on my desktop.

Now, before you condemn me to the nerd-set, I’m only going to cover one in this blog, and specifically one that covers a topic that’s relevant for advisors and their clients: how to best protect against inflation.

“Good Ideas Can’t Be Scheduled” is the title of a 2019 blog post by Morgan Housel of Collaborative Fund. His point was that deadlines shouldn’t be placed on good ideas, regardless of field, but the execution of good ideas is the opposite.

One of Blueprint’s best “good ideas” presented itself just like that – unscheduled – at a daunting time, during the height of pandemic-fueled market uncertainty. But we felt it would create clear advantages for financial advisors and their clients, so we got to work executing our plan.

Liquid alternatives are darlings of diversification and downside protection for some advisors, many of whom looked in the rear-view mirror during and after the Great Recession and saw the need for a new way to manage risk.

Now that liquid alts have outgrown adolescence and had ample opportunity to prove their mettle, we examined their performance in a just-released primer, “An Alternative to Liquid Alternatives.”

I love the beach, but I am not a huge fan of the ocean.

Maybe I’m alone here, but after watching “Jaws,” National Geographic programming, Shark Week on Discovery, and “Sharknado” 1-6, I just cannot shake that uneasy feeling when I’m venturing into the surf. Even when I’ve had the privilege of swimming or snorkeling in those crystal-clear Caribbean waters, there’s still a bit of anxiety of what’s potentially lurking in the distance just out of sight.

As we talk to advisors, it’s clear my feelings about getting into the ocean are similar to how they feel as they put client money to work during this seemingly endless bull market.

We routinely encounter advisors who are struggling with how to invest in equities right now. This is particularly tricky for those that have taken a more cautious approach during the last couple of years and now have to face tough performance-related questions and risk losing clients.

What are your re-watchable movies? For me, it’s several cult classics from the mid-90s. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve seen them, if I happen to catch them when flipping through the channels, I’m going to stop. Unfortunately, I usually end up only watching briefly until my wife rolls her eyes and asks, “Again…really?”

Recently, during my 845^th viewing of “Tommy Boy,” I noticed an interesting parallel between Tommy’s description of the guarantee when selling brake pads and the act of wholesaling downside protection to advisors. Indeed, the guarantee does make you feel all warm and toasty inside, but is it really a “guarantee fairy” who’s a crazy glue sniffer?