Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Hello and welcome to
Speaker 1: The Money Stuff Podcast. You're a weekly podcast. Are you
Speaker 1: talking about stuff related to money? I'm Matt Levine and
Speaker 1: I write The Money Stuff com Bloomberg Opinion, and.
Speaker 2: I'm Katie Greifeld, a reporter for Bloomberg News and an
Speaker 2: anchor for Bloomberg Television. And today it's a nail back.
Speaker 2: Dear listeners just keep on sending in questions, and it
Speaker 2: feels like it's about time. It also helps that I'm
Speaker 2: on vacation right now. We're recording this in the future.
Speaker 2: In the past, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm the Sloops.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely, I am actively skiing right now. Remember we
Speaker 2: did an episode about cocoa futures.
Speaker 1: How could I forget?
Speaker 2: I forgot a little bit, but I was so tickled
Speaker 2: by this question. Yeah, we did. We talked about Hersheyr.
Speaker 1: Can I forget? Coming back to me, Matt.
Speaker 2: We have a question from Patrick, who says, thanks to
Speaker 2: your podcast, I'm now obsessed with chocolate futures contracts. I
Speaker 2: have a question about these chocolate warehouses that I just
Speaker 2: can't understand. Maybe you can help me if they exist
Speaker 2: to facilitate futures contracts. Why is the quality of the
Speaker 2: chocolate often bad? I thought futures contracts specified the quality
Speaker 2: of the chocolate in advance, in terms of origin and grade.
Speaker 2: Is it not a flaw in the system that worst
Speaker 2: chocolate is being put in these warehouses? Thanks? I love
Speaker 2: that questions, good question. I did some Reportingeah, I I
Speaker 2: went to Bloomberg Intelligence. When I have like a niche
Speaker 2: question about a topic I know very little about. I'm
Speaker 2: going to read this out loud. Sure, I got this
Speaker 2: email and I read it really quickly, so I haven't
Speaker 2: thought deeply about this. So hello, You're completely right. Contracts
Speaker 2: would specify the quality and origin of cocoa beans, and
Speaker 2: this is the reason why cocoa really doesn't have one
Speaker 2: single price, but several that reflect these differences. So to
Speaker 2: illustrate this from a higher level perspective, at the end
Speaker 2: of last year, the ic COO published a report noting
Speaker 2: that the price difference between London futures and NY was
Speaker 2: due to London having more beans from Cameroon, which are
Speaker 2: perceived to be of lower quality. Now, because cocoa is
Speaker 2: a soft maybe there is some scope for exchanges to
Speaker 2: hold lower quality or just mismanaged inventories. Don't really know
Speaker 2: to what extent this is happening. Now, I'll leave a
Speaker 2: quote quite popular among cocoa market participants. Quote when there
Speaker 2: is a lot of cocoa, all cocoa is crap. When
Speaker 2: there is no cocoa, all crap is cocoa. Oh dear,
Speaker 2: I hadn't read that first. That's really funny. It's all
Speaker 2: crap is coco. That is so interesting. I guess I
Speaker 2: haven't really thought about it before that. When you take
Speaker 2: a look at commodities such as this and you think
Speaker 2: about the different prices on the different exchanges, I have
Speaker 2: never thought that maybe the quality in this case of
Speaker 2: cocoa explains the difference. Yeah, because with oil, I mean,
Speaker 2: I don't really think about the quality of oil, but
Speaker 2: it makes sense that there's I don't because I don't
Speaker 2: think about that, but it makes sense. Yes, true, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I.
Speaker 1: Read about this a lot. Like if you're a chocolate maker,
Speaker 1: you want cocoa to put into chocolate, and like if
Speaker 1: your a chocolate bars tastes bad, that's bad for you.
Speaker 1: If you're a commodity's futures warehouse, you need cocoa to
Speaker 1: like be the underlying deliverable for the commodity future since
Speaker 1: you put that in the warehouse, but you don't expect
Speaker 1: that most people trading the futures will take delivery of
Speaker 1: the cocoa, and so there's like a little bit more
Speaker 1: of a disconnect, like you have to use pct vigrate
Speaker 1: and everything, but like it's a little bit less important
Speaker 1: that the cocoa taste good if it's mostly being used
Speaker 1: as a substrate for commodities futures contracts, then if you're
Speaker 1: actually just putting it directly into chocolate bars. And so
Speaker 1: there are a couple of like examples of this from
Speaker 1: the not chocolate market, which my very favorite is that
Speaker 1: in the nickel market, Yes there's a warehouse, put nickel
Speaker 1: in it. You trade futures on the nickel. Nickel is
Speaker 1: kind of non perishable and so like you never really
Speaker 1: have to say the nickel out of the warehouse, and
Speaker 1: so it just sits in the warehouse for years. And
Speaker 1: at some point someone discovered that some nickel that JP
Speaker 1: Morgan owned not because it was like JP Morgan nickel,
Speaker 1: because like they you know, happen to take the liver
Speaker 1: around the futures contract. The nickel in this warehouse that
Speaker 1: JP Morgan owned was actually a bag of rocks, and
Speaker 1: like it was fine, Like who cares. They never took
Speaker 1: it out, They never like made anything with it. Was
Speaker 1: just a bag of rocks and the thing. But like,
Speaker 1: once you discover it's a bag of rocks, you can
Speaker 1: no longer use it to trade nickel futures. But until
Speaker 1: then it doesn't matter. You're not like building anything. The
Speaker 1: other great example is coffee futures. Yeah, in the coffee market,
Speaker 1: coffee is like cocoa, perishable, and so there are rules
Speaker 1: about like quality of the coffee that goes into the
Speaker 1: coffee warehouses. One of the rules like you can't leave
Speaker 1: it there forever, right because it's perishable, and so there's
Speaker 1: an age penalty where like you get paid less if
Speaker 1: you deliver old coffee. But it used to be that
Speaker 1: you could take your older beans off the exchange and
Speaker 1: then resubmit them for a new round of certification and
Speaker 1: get rid of the age penalty. So the beans are
Speaker 1: so like abstracted that like taking them out and putting
Speaker 1: them back in makes them fresh new beans again, which
Speaker 1: is not how like actual coffee brewing works. But for
Speaker 1: commodities futures. It's fine, it's good enough, and they change
Speaker 1: that rule, so like now you have to the fresher coffee.
Speaker 2: That would be a disgusting cup of coffee.
Speaker 1: I mean yes, like I think coffee. Probably you could go, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know, pretty high standards.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, fun you would not drink no commodities futures
Speaker 1: exchange coffee. I probably would just for rust.
Speaker 2: I mean, if I was dying, that would be kind
Speaker 2: of fun.
Speaker 1: I think you should do it. So different commodities have
Speaker 1: different rules, but like in general, like the need to
Speaker 1: have like the freshest possible commodity, Like you want that
Speaker 1: for your industrial uses, not for your putting in an
Speaker 1: a warehouse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great question, Patrick, that was That was a lot
Speaker 2: of fun. Mail bag, mail bag. This question comes from
Speaker 2: justin straight after my own heart. With the advent of
Speaker 2: a private credit ETF is an adverse selection and inherent issue.
Speaker 2: What is to protect the retail investor and prevent the
Speaker 2: ETF manager from stuffing the fun with the loans it
Speaker 2: expects to underperform with respect to similar loans from a
Speaker 2: particular vintage. That is, like the most pessimistic fear here
Speaker 2: a very reasonable fear, I know, but you would hope
Speaker 2: that Apollo isn't trying to like use retail as exit
Speaker 2: liquidity or whatever.
Speaker 1: I mean, you would hope you hope that all the
Speaker 1: loans are good. Yeah, And like as an asset manager,
Speaker 1: you have fiducial idities to all of your clients and
Speaker 1: you try to make only the best loans. It is weird,
Speaker 1: you know, Like, you know, you look at Apollo, like
Speaker 1: much of their capital is their balance sheet, right, I
Speaker 1: mean they run a big retirement services company, right, so yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of it is their balance sheet. A lot
Speaker 1: of it is client money that pays stereotypically two and twenty, right,
Speaker 1: It's probably not really two and twenty, but like you know,
Speaker 1: people who pay kind of like alternative manager fees, and
Speaker 1: some of it is like ETF money who pay let
Speaker 1: our fees. So where do you put the best loans?
Speaker 1: Your insurance company, your balance sheet? Very smart people run that,
Speaker 1: your limited partners and your institutional prior credit funds, smart
Speaker 1: repeat player allocators, your retail ETF clients. Who knows? Well?
Speaker 2: I actually did reporting for this question as well. I
Speaker 2: sat down with Annopoglia from State Street Global Advisors on
Speaker 2: March thirteenth on Bloomberg Television and I asked her this question,
Speaker 2: does State Street have the in house expertise to sort
Speaker 2: of evaluate what Apollo is putting in the ETF? And
Speaker 2: this was her answer.
Speaker 3: She said, we do have the expertise in house, but
Speaker 3: we also made the new hire set to make sure
Speaker 3: that we had the right in seed SSGA is the
Speaker 3: advisor by design. We wanted us to be in a
Speaker 3: position to make selections and have investment discretion on what
Speaker 3: task sets to take or not to take from Apollo.
Speaker 1: That's the sounds a blance right, is like, yeah, the
Speaker 1: ETF manager has a fiducial abbligation to the ETF clients
Speaker 1: and they have their own independent ability to make sure
Speaker 1: they're not getting stuffed with like Apollo's worse loans. But
Speaker 1: it's like Apollo, it's like not in the business of
Speaker 1: like trying to make the worst loans, right, so like
Speaker 1: they're trying to also make good loans. If you think
Speaker 1: about like a bond ETF, like you have the same
Speaker 1: risk there. And the reason people don't think about it
Speaker 1: very much like they do a little bit right because
Speaker 1: like there are sometimes like worries about chart picking But
Speaker 1: the reason people don't think about it that much is because,
Speaker 1: like you know, a bond fund has like a track record.
Speaker 1: There's an incentive for like PIMCO to not do a
Speaker 1: bad job managing its public bond funds because then people
Speaker 1: won't put money into them. Yeah, the prior CREDITTF stuff
Speaker 1: is new, and so there's no like through the cycle
Speaker 1: performance data where you can tell whether a fund is
Speaker 1: good or not right, and so you have to worry
Speaker 1: about this stuff. In the long run, you sort of
Speaker 1: assume that, like people will try to manage funds well
Speaker 1: because that's how they raise money.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it doesn't have a track re heard, And I
Speaker 2: think that's an important point because there are a lot
Speaker 2: of very pessimistic concerns about the CTF. But it just
Speaker 2: hasn't been alive for very long.
Speaker 1: Right, Like you could like sort of tell a story
Speaker 1: of like private credit has had this like massive boom
Speaker 1: and the market might be turning a little bit and
Speaker 1: that was the perfect time to stuff retail with it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's like.
Speaker 2: A kind of a I mean, we're recording this in
Speaker 2: the future, so who knows what it looks like. Yeah,
Speaker 2: maybe things will be totally better by the time this
Speaker 2: episode comes out. But great question, mail bag, mail Bag,
Speaker 2: we have another question. I don't have a name to
Speaker 2: attach to this one, but the question is fun. As
Speaker 2: we accelerate slash descend into the scenario where Elon Musk
Speaker 2: is God King and the answer to every question is
Speaker 2: because that's what Elon wants. What's the point of digging
Speaker 2: into anything, Matt, take us into this existential spiral, right.
Speaker 1: I used to think of my job as like trying
Speaker 1: to understand and explain complex structural financial topics, and then
Speaker 1: like memestocks hit and I found myself writing a lot
Speaker 1: of very dumb stuff and like coining the Elon market hypothesis,
Speaker 1: which is, yeah, financial assets are valuable not because of
Speaker 1: their cash flows, but because of their proximity to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Because like there was a time and it's kind of
Speaker 1: continuing where like Elon would like tweet about a thing
Speaker 1: and like the thing would go up, and it's like
Speaker 1: doage cooin, or like there's a story about Signal where
Speaker 1: he tweeted Signal and like an unrelated company with Signal
Speaker 1: his name went up. Like just anything like he turned
Speaker 1: his attention to would go up. And if you sort
Speaker 1: of like looked at that and thought, well, the present
Speaker 1: value of the expected future cashlows of this company has
Speaker 1: gone up because Elon tweeted about it, Then you would
Speaker 1: be missing the point. And like what was actually happening
Speaker 1: was just like yeah, people like Elan Musk and the
Speaker 1: stock goes up right, And then like Memestock's kind of
Speaker 1: crystallized that, like a lot of mental energy went into
Speaker 1: like understanding the technicalities of a game stop where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, like you could have a thesis about the
Speaker 1: company's turnound, or you can be like, oh, like there's
Speaker 1: a gamma squeeze and a short squeeze. There's all this
Speaker 1: like technical stuff that you can understand. But like mostly
Speaker 1: it was like people online liked it and this so
Speaker 1: they bought it and went up. Right, everything got kind
Speaker 1: of dumber, and our current political environment has expanded that dramatically.
Speaker 1: You know, I wrote, let's say last week now about
Speaker 1: the US Consumer Financial Protection BEEAU. The CFPP right like,
Speaker 1: has written some rules about how financial companies are supposed
Speaker 1: to interact with consumer customers, and those rules have been
Speaker 1: sort of suspended by everyone of the FB being told
Speaker 1: to go home. But like they're still there. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so there's only like stuff you can look at and
Speaker 1: me like, oh, like the rules say this or like
Speaker 1: this is like how you're supposed to do stuff, but
Speaker 1: like it's not clear that how you're supposed to do
Speaker 1: stuff matters anymore, that the rules are enforceable, And so
Speaker 1: we're in this sort of weird gray area where like
Speaker 1: if you try too hard to understand what is allowed
Speaker 1: or how things work, you will be making mistakes because
Speaker 1: like things don't work the way they're supposed to work,
Speaker 1: and the rules don't necessarily apply anymore. And that's a
Speaker 1: frustrating position to be in if you're in the business
Speaker 1: of trying to understand things.
Speaker 2: How does it make you feel as a person who
Speaker 2: writes a newsletter though, because it seems like you had
Speaker 2: fun with the GameStop era.
Speaker 1: I define fund with the GameStop era, but it ate
Speaker 1: at me because I was like, I wish I had
Speaker 1: insight to off or have elite jokes.
Speaker 2: Well, when all else fails, at least we can laugh. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we still have our.
Speaker 1: Loster sort of like yeah, I don't know. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: as a person who has a newsletter, like there are
Speaker 1: always events, but they are not interesting events.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's a parallel to be drawn with
Speaker 2: my life on TV. News is always happening. I anchor
Speaker 2: from nine to eleven, and there's just so many tape
Speaker 2: bombs coming across all the time. But you know you
Speaker 2: have to wonder at the end of the day, like
Speaker 2: did I add value?
Speaker 1: I wonder every day.
Speaker 2: I cannot. I can't answer this question on this podcast.
Speaker 2: Cool great question, mail Bag, mail Bag. I like this one.
Speaker 2: This question comes from Bruce. It's a little bit of
Speaker 2: a long one, so tuck in. Bruce says, I'm intrigued
Speaker 2: by your recent coverage, so stick with us, all right, Bruce.
Speaker 2: Bruce says, I'm intrigued by your recent coverage of super
Speaker 2: performing private investment funds sefed heavily with techies. For my
Speaker 2: spy novel, I invented a tech heavy hedge fund whose
Speaker 2: principles are former CIA contractors who go from stealing Oligarch
Speaker 2: secrets to stealing Oligarch cash, which they then launder through
Speaker 2: a private fund whose operations are a black box to
Speaker 2: the outside world. My villains reverse engineer capital market data
Speaker 2: to fake trade reports for their tame auditor that explained
Speaker 2: the funds quote unquote returns. I'm not accusing the funds
Speaker 2: you wrote about of anything nefarious. I'm just struck by
Speaker 2: how much they resemble the fictional high tech high return
Speaker 2: mcguffin in my book. Is that crazy?
Speaker 1: Is there?
Speaker 2: For a recent A real world operator with bad intentions
Speaker 2: couldn't take say, the cash from his cocaine business and
Speaker 2: report it as fictional market returns from a proprietary model
Speaker 2: investment fund, pay some tax, and then have untraceable money
Speaker 2: to spend. Just asking the question, and not for legal advice, Bruce,
Speaker 2: don't give away this gold material. As someone who's also
Speaker 2: working on a kooky novel, you know, you can't say
Speaker 2: too much.
Speaker 1: Have you not described your entire navel on this podcast?
Speaker 2: Off Mike? For sure.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit like Bernie made Off right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little different. But like Bernie Madoff pretended to
Speaker 1: have investing returns and in fact had you know, Ponzi returns,
Speaker 1: and people who are knowledgeable noticed that and said he
Speaker 1: can't really have these investment returns. Someone is just like
Speaker 1: he like, was doing more pretend volume than there was
Speaker 1: volume in the stocks he was pretending to trade, right,
Speaker 1: And so you have a little of that here. If
Speaker 1: you were in the business of like selling drugs, yeah,
Speaker 1: and then taking the money and pretending the money was
Speaker 1: returns from your hedge fund, you would be reporting to
Speaker 1: a regulator something about your trades, and the regular would
Speaker 1: be like, but you don't have a custodian, you don't
Speaker 1: have audited financial and like maybe like you grab your
Speaker 1: auditor and maybe like the SEC is fooled, as they
Speaker 1: kind of were with Bernie made Off. But it seems
Speaker 1: like a lot of effort to go through in a
Speaker 1: lot of like surface area for regulatory exposure. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you'd probably rather run like a coin opp laundromat or something, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: There's a lot of ways to launder money that don't
Speaker 1: involve like entering a regulated industry.
Speaker 2: So, Bruce, I do want you to keep in touch
Speaker 2: though you know where this, Yes, did you get further
Speaker 2: along with the novel? Love to know the title?
Speaker 1: He's not like the only person who's ever thought this.
Speaker 1: A while back, there is like a kerfuffle when uh oh,
Speaker 1: when someone speculated that Bridgewater might be a Ponzi scheme
Speaker 1: because they like were trading with like someone who they
Speaker 1: expected them to be trading with the people had this
Speaker 1: tether too, where they're like, who trades with tether? Whoere
Speaker 1: do they get all their stuff from? But those things
Speaker 1: seem to be wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think Bridgewater is a Ponzi scheme.
Speaker 1: No, I don't either. Okay, there was a minute where
Speaker 1: people were like, oh, that's interesting.
Speaker 2: I feel like some of those tether questions are still
Speaker 2: out there. Yeah, great question, Bruce, Good luck with the novel.
Speaker 2: Maybe people have had this thought before, but turns out
Speaker 2: it's really hard to actually write a novel. So I
Speaker 2: respect very hard.
Speaker 1: That's making money and contrary.
Speaker 2: Mail bag mail Bag one more from Andy, Let's bring
Speaker 2: it home, Andy says. Matt's newsletter today mentioned how financial
Speaker 2: advice was traditionally bundled, where the overpriced stock picking paid
Speaker 2: for the useful advice. This reminded me of a dumb
Speaker 2: question I've had for years. Why doesn't anyone offer unbundled
Speaker 2: financial advice on a fee for service basis? I want
Speaker 2: to pay someone a fixed fee to chat with me
Speaker 2: once per quarter about my goals, asset allocation, tax considerations,
Speaker 2: when I can retire, et cetera. But as far as
Speaker 2: I can tell and I've looked. No one offers these
Speaker 2: services without bundling them with money management services where the
Speaker 2: fee structure is a percent of AUM, and then they
Speaker 2: charge like one percent of AUM, which feels like a lot.
Speaker 2: It sounds like Vanguard is offering a cheaper version of
Speaker 2: this for like twenty basis points of AUM in improvement.
Speaker 2: But if I have like five million dollars to invest,
Speaker 2: that works out to two thy five hundred per quarterly
Speaker 2: zoom call or whatever. Seems like a bit expensive. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Does unbundled financial advice exist?
Speaker 1: I feel like it must a little bit, but like, right,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot. And you see why. It's like
Speaker 1: the opposite of his problem, right, Like, if you're offering
Speaker 1: zoom calls to people to talk about their hopes and
Speaker 1: dreams and portfolio allocations, yeah, and you do you four
Speaker 1: zoom calls a year with that person. You have to
Speaker 1: like market yourself. You have to find hundreds of clients
Speaker 1: and you have to amortize the cost of that over
Speaker 1: the zoom calls. You do have to charge them hundreds
Speaker 1: or thousands of dollars for the zoom call because that's
Speaker 1: just your time on the zoom call. It's your time
Speaker 1: like marketing and like, you know, building the business, and
Speaker 1: then like who wants to pit dollars for a zoom
Speaker 1: call when you put it like that, right, if you
Speaker 1: put it as like, I'll provide you holistic services in
Speaker 1: exchange for a small percentage of your assets, then people like, yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: And if the small percentage one percently works out to
Speaker 1: thousands of dollars, but I don't know, like you don't
Speaker 1: get into the financial services industry to like build a
Speaker 1: captive out for your hours, like you want the ability
Speaker 1: to scale. And it's also it's like a natural form
Speaker 1: of price discrimination, where like if you get a small client,
Speaker 1: you can charge them a small amount of money because
Speaker 1: you're charging them a fixed percentage of assets under management,
Speaker 1: And if they then grow into a large client, you
Speaker 1: charge them a large amount of money and they don't
Speaker 1: notice because it's the same percentage of assets under management.
Speaker 1: And it's just like a better business model for someone
Speaker 1: who is, like you know, kind of largely in the
Speaker 1: business of marketing and funding clients. That just seems like
Speaker 1: the answer, right, Like, it seems like a bad business
Speaker 1: model for someone to be in to be like I'll
Speaker 1: give you some financial advice for an hour for one
Speaker 1: hundred bucks, Like, I just don't think you can make
Speaker 1: a living doing that. I will say that Andy found
Speaker 1: a solution, so he continues, I think I found a workaround.
Speaker 1: I signed up for a wirehouse financial advisor. He charges
Speaker 1: like one percent of AUM, but I only pay him
Speaker 1: for the accounts I keep with him, which I keep
Speaker 1: around the minimum he'll tolerate. And he's not the only
Speaker 1: person who has done this. Like, you know, you find
Speaker 1: a financial advisor, You're like, how much do I need
Speaker 1: to put with you? He tells you five hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: You put five hundred thousand dollars with him for the
Speaker 1: rest of the money and index funds, you know, and
Speaker 1: like your self directed Vanguard account, and then you call
Speaker 1: your financial advisor. I record it for advice. Right, you
Speaker 1: get like a lot of the tax advice and whatever
Speaker 1: that you get from the bundled fee, But you're not
Speaker 1: paying him one percent of all of your ass as.
Speaker 1: You're paying one percent of the minimum amount of assets
Speaker 1: to get him on the phone.
Speaker 2: Does that feel a little mean to the financial advisors? Like, Hey,
Speaker 2: I have this sum with you, but I have like
Speaker 2: two million dollars in my Vanguard account, give me advice
Speaker 2: based on my holistic.
Speaker 1: I don't think the financial advisor would like give you
Speaker 1: advice basically. I don't think the sial adviser would be like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's what you should do with your Vanguard account, right, Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: what you're looking for from the financial advisor is not
Speaker 1: only like what should my asset allocation be? Yeah, you'd
Speaker 1: rather he'll give you that. I hate to like undermine
Speaker 1: financial advisor. Will they give you a thing being like
Speaker 1: this is how much you have in stocks or bonds? Right,
Speaker 1: and you can believe that or not right, because like
Speaker 1: the financial advisor knows that and you don't, right, But
Speaker 1: like whatever, they're.
Speaker 2: Probably buying a model portfolio from Black Rocks, so.
Speaker 1: Sure they've got some professional deciding how much you should
Speaker 1: have in stocks and bonds or whatever, and like they'll
Speaker 1: tell you that, and they'll do that with the portfolio
Speaker 1: they manage, and then you're gonna mirror that with your
Speaker 1: Vanguard account, right, you know, kind of more or less.
Speaker 2: I just feel though.
Speaker 1: The rude to mirror it exactly. It's rude.
Speaker 2: But also I feel like maybe you'd invest differently if
Speaker 2: you have more money rather than less, If that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Maybe I think that the only way to really know is,
Speaker 2: you know, if Andy would let us listen to one
Speaker 2: of these phone calls that he has with his financial advisor.
Speaker 1: The other thing is they say is like, you're not
Speaker 1: mainly looking for advice about how to invest. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: looking for advice about tax harvesting. You're looking for advice
Speaker 1: about like what the gift tex limits are on putting
Speaker 1: money into a five twenty nine. You're looking for advice
Speaker 1: about like how much money you need to say for
Speaker 1: a time, Like you've all this like stuff that a
Speaker 1: financial advisor does. Yeah, that is useful for you. That
Speaker 1: is not like here's how much you should have in stocked.
Speaker 2: I know, but I'm saying it's.
Speaker 1: The least useful part. Yeah, like no one knows.
Speaker 2: But like retirement planning, for example, Like it would probably
Speaker 2: be useful if the financial advisor had a holistic view
Speaker 2: at all of your portfolios. That's right, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: And some financial advisors will consider all of your money
Speaker 1: and providing you that advice, even though not all of
Speaker 1: it is with them, because like you know, there's like
Speaker 1: and he's not the only person who like has money elsewhere? Right,
Speaker 1: and the financial advisor like tries to give you a
Speaker 1: host of picture and like they'll be mad if like
Speaker 1: most of your money has elsewhere and they're you're calling
Speaker 1: them every day, but like it's not like all or
Speaker 1: nothing true. So I don't know that's the way to
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 2: Good question, Andy, Good good question.
Speaker 1: And good answer. Yeah, all the conundrum right now, Like
Speaker 1: I mean, like there's some minimum that the financial advisor charges,
Speaker 1: and if you have that minimum with them, you're paying
Speaker 1: a certain number of thousands of dollars a year for
Speaker 1: your quarterly zoom call with them. And that's the going
Speaker 1: rate for financial advice. And if you have one hundred
Speaker 1: times the minimum with them, then you're paying more. And
Speaker 1: you could put ninety nine percent of that money into
Speaker 1: a Vanguard self tractored account and pay less, but like
Speaker 1: you don't want that, and you're paying for service.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, all right, Well that was our meal
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Speaker 2: I'm Matt Levian and I'm Katie Greifeld.
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