Voices [0:01]

A foolish consistency, is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer, a different drummer.

Mostly Mary [0:19]

And now, coming to you from dead center on your dial, welcome to Risk Parity Radio, where we explore alternatives and asset allocations for the do-it-yourself investor Broadcasting to you now from the comfort of his easy chair. Here is your host, frank Vasquez.

Mostly Uncle Frank [0:37]

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to Risk Parity Radio. If you have just stumbled in here, you will find that this podcast is kind of like a dive bar of personal finance and do-it-yourself investing.

Voices [0:52]

Expect the unexpected.

Mostly Uncle Frank [0:55]

It's a relatively small place. It's just me and Mary in here and we only have a few mismatched bar stools and some easy chairs. We have no sponsors, we have no guests and we have no expansion plans.

Voices [1:11]

I don't think I'd like another job.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:13]

What we do have is a little free library of updated and unconflicted information for do-it-yourself investors.

Voices [1:23]

Now, who's up for a trip to the library tomorrow?

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:28]

So please enjoy our mostly cold beer served in cans and our coffee served in old, chipped and cracked mugs, along with what our little free library has to offer.

Voices [1:43]

Welcome.

Mostly Uncle Frank [1:54]

But now onward, episode 446. Today on Risk Parity Radio, it's time for our weekly portfolio reviews. Of the eight sample portfolios you can find at wwwriskparityradiocom on the portfolios page, Boring. But before I put you to sleep with that, I'm intrigued by this how you say Emails. And First off. First off, we have an email from the Postmaster.

Voices [2:22]

The Postman always rings twice and the Postmaster the postman always rings twice and the Postmaster writes Hi Frank.

Mostly Mary [2:29]

You say you have 1,500 loyal listeners and I am most certainly one of them. Your no-nonsense approach is exactly my style.

Voices [2:38]

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest man.

Mostly Mary [2:45]

Next month I'll begin drawing down on my portfolio at about 4% annually. I was just recently in 100% equities but due to your show, I've moved to 70% equities, 20% long-term treasury bonds and 10% managed futures. But honestly, I don't understand how managed future funds like DBMF work enough to feel confident. I know you've done explanations in prior episodes, but I need more cowbell. Can you please do a deep dive for us? Alternative asset classes like this are new to many of us.

Voices [3:18]

No more flying solo. You need somebody watching your back at all times.

Mostly Mary [3:24]

I get that its main role in a risk parity portfolio is to provide uncorrelated diversification, but what exactly produces the 5% yield? What are the majority of contracts investing in? Will this change over time, and exactly who or what is establishing all these future price trends? Thanks, I bow to my sensei.

Voices [3:45]

Bow to your sensei, bow to your sensei Bow to your sensei.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:49]

So Ian wants a primer on managed futures.

Voices [3:52]

That is the straight stuff. Oh, funk master.

Mostly Uncle Frank [3:55]

Oh, I think we can probably accommodate that here.

Voices [3:59]

You're that smart. Let me put it this way have you ever heard of Plato, aristotle, socrates? Yes, morons, really.

Mostly Uncle Frank [4:15]

We first started talking about this back in episodes 55 and 57, when we were talking about the ETF DBMF in particular, and I would go back and listen to that because it also talks about the subject matter in general. I'm also going to link to an academic article that is called Demystifying Managed Futures. It's from the AQR website. It's published in the Journal of Investment Management in 2013. And that has probably more than you want to know about the topic, including some of the other academic research that supports why it works, including some papers by Kahneman and Tversky from 1974 and some other things. But managed futures is essentially a trading strategy and the most popular strategy that is used in this context is called trend following colloquially. Academically it's called a time series momentum strategy, which is described in that article. We'll reinvest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest and it's gone. It's been around longer than our lifetimes. Really. I know it's been around since before I was born, in the 1960s.

Voices [5:23]

We made up our own games like chew the bark off the tree. You and your friends would fight a nice oak tree and you start chewing the skin off of it, and there were no winners. Everybody was a loser. It rotted your teeth and left your intestines scarred and knotted, and that's the way it was, and we liked it. We loved it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [5:45]

And it's based on the observation that oftentimes, when something like a commodity starts going up or down in price, it tends to continue doing that for some period of time and if you just follow it along in a reasonable way, you can make profits out of it. Now, obviously, this contradicts parts of efficient market theory. Now, obviously, this contradicts parts of efficient market theory, but what that's telling you is probably that efficient market theory isn't that efficient, probably because we're talking about a complex adaptive system. When you're talking about financial markets, and if you really want to get into the math of that, this is the fractal math of Benoit Mandelbrot, and there's a book called the Misbehavior of Markets, which is probably one of the best books about financial markets ever written from the math point of view, and that's published in 2007. I would definitely read that if you're interested in why efficient market theory probably isn't the be-all, end-all of financial theories and that it works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, oftentimes what you get are these kind of trends. Sometimes it doesn't, and when it doesn't, oftentimes what you get are these kind of trends.

Mostly Uncle Frank [6:48]

So, traditionally, hedge funds have come up with proprietary strategies to do trend following and other trading of futures contracts. And while I actually did some of this on my own back in the 1990s, I can tell you it's a lot of work if you're going to be doing it on your own, because you have to track these things every day and implement some kind of algorithm to make your trades both getting in and out of them, and until recent times I mean in the past eight years or so this was prohibitively expensive. If you're going to pay a hedge fund to do it, you're probably paying two, three, four percent of your assets invested in that for the privilege which made it uneconomic for most people unless you were running some kind of institutional framework. But with the advent of funds like DBMF, that became possible after the SEC changed the rules about ETFs back in 2018 or 2019, this has been possible at a reasonable price, and a reasonable price here is about 0.8% is what these funds typically charge now, which sounds like a lot, and it is price here is about 0.8% is what these funds typically charge now, which sounds like a lot. And it is a lot if you're comparing it to an index fund, but it's not a lot if you're comparing it to other advanced trading strategies and the returns on.

Mostly Uncle Frank [7:56]

These sorts of funds tend to be somewhere between stocks and bonds. So if you think of stocks returning 8% after inflation and bonds returning 4% after inflation or something low like that, managed futures are going to be somewhere in between around 6% or something like that. What's the most attractive thing about them is they have zero correlation to any base asset, so they make great diversifiers. So this strategy has become much more popular in the past five years or so, I would say, and a lot of registered investment advisors are now using these funds in their clients' portfolios. Dbmf is kind of the leading fund in this area. We'll talk a little bit more about that. There's another one called KMLM that follows a strategy that's been around at least since the 1990s, and so you can backtest it back there, not in its current form, but in a different form. There's a fund called CTA, put out by Simplify. That is an interesting fund, and now both Fidelity and BlackRock iShares have put out their own managed futures funds just this year. The Fidelity one is ticker FFUT, the iShares one is ticker ISMF, but they haven't been around long enough to determine how good or bad they are.

Mostly Uncle Frank [9:07]

So these funds trade a whole bunch of different assets. Traditionally, commodities were traded like this agricultural, precious metals, energy. The other things that is commonly traded are interest rates or bonds, and also currencies, but now these funds typically also follow the large equity indexes, whether that's the Emerging Markets Index or the US Index. What's interesting about the strategy is it can go long or short, so it can essentially be betting on whether the price of something is going to go down or going to go up once a trend appears, and they are run on algorithms which basically tell them okay, we've got the signal, let's buy now, and there's usually a stop. So the thing is either going to get out of the trade right away if it's not working, or, if it's working, it's going to follow the trade until there's a reversal. That's all best explained in that article, though.

Mostly Uncle Frank [10:01]

Now, traditionally, trend followers or hedge fund operators will follow dozens and dozens of different commodities or tradable assets and sometimes even trade individual stocks like this, and the reason you want exposure to so many different things is because you don't know what's going to be trending next. Oftentimes, things just aren't trending, and so you're not in any market. So, for instance, for most of the past decade or so, currencies have not trended much. They've tended to stay within a very narrow band. More recently this year, in fact, the dollar has been trending lower against most other currencies, and so most of these funds have picked up on that trend and are profiting from either going long euro or short dollar or some other combination of currencies there.

Mostly Uncle Frank [10:49]

In 2022, the big trend was in interest rates, when interest rates were going up, so a lot of these funds had one of their best years in 2022. They were up 20% or 30% just because they were following the trend in the interest rate and essentially going short bonds. So if you had this in your portfolio as your bond fund was suffering, this was making up for it because it was essentially going the opposite way due to the trend. And you will find these kinds of strategies tend to perform best in the worst kind of markets either severely increasing inflation or some other dislocation, or in a deflationary scenario or a recessionary scenario like 2008. They did well in that environment as well. Where they kind of hang out and do nothing is when things are fine looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines they also have what is called positive skew.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:44]

Now, what does that mean? Well, think about how the stock market tends to work. When it's going up, it tends to go up steadily. When it's going down, it tends to drop. As they say, the market goes up the stairs and down the elevator.

Mostly Uncle Frank [11:59]

Well, these kind of strategies tend to work in the opposite way, that most of the time they'll hang around and not do much at all. It'll be close to zero or a small percentage annually, either positive or negative. But when they do particularly well, that is when you see the biggest gains, and you almost never see these things lose like 20% or something like that in a year. They just don't do that because they get out of these trades before that happens. So if you look at the annual returns for one of these funds, you'll see things that are largely between negative 5% and positive 5% most years, and then 20% or 30% every once in a while. And again, that helps a lot with diversification.

Mostly Uncle Frank [12:41]

Okay, now about the yield you asked about where does that come from? Well, most of these funds hold their collateral in T-bills, because in order to trade managed futures, you have to have collateral either held in cash or something else. So they hold it in T-bills and that tends to generate some interest every year. The other source of returns that are distributed have to do with trading, and the more trading there is, the more likely there's going to be distributions based on short-term trading. So that's where the yield comes from. So most of these are traded on their own individual proprietary strategies that the operators have devised. But now we have things like DBMF, which have become very interesting. They're the closest thing to index funds that we have in this area. Now what DBMF actually does is called replication. So the operators are looking at what is called the Societe Generale CTA index and there's a couple of indexes that they follow on there. That is a bank that follows hedge funds that do these kind of strategies.

Voices [13:45]

You don't fight the nice.

Voices [13:46]

English pig dogs.

Mostly Uncle Frank [13:49]

And so the operators of DBMF are looking at that index, feeding that into an algorithm, a computer program, which then reverse engineers what you would have to hold to get those results in terms of managed futures. So it's very clever and it relies on, I think, 12 different asset classes. It specifically limits the asset classes so that it can limit the trading and do this more efficiently than most funds are run. They actually put out a nice little video every month or so. The people that run DBMF I'll link to the YouTube channel in the show notes, but that actually gives you a nice little summary of sort of what's going on in managed futures this year and where does DBMF fall into that and how does that compare with other things. And then you can see the sources of returns and what they are holding. They actually will change their holding every week and you can look it up on an Excel spreadsheet they publish on their website if you're interested in seeing what's in there. But then they run their algorithm every week and change the trades as appropriate. They don't change that much in one week, but it does change its holdings over time.

Mostly Uncle Frank [15:01]

So, as I mentioned, this has become a very useful diversifier in diversified portfolios, and I even see articles on Morningstar about using this.

Mostly Uncle Frank [15:10]

Now I'll see if I can link to one of those in the show notes, primarily because it is completely uncorrelated to both stocks and bonds and then has this positive skew attribute to it, which tends to help reduce the overall volatility of a portfolio, and so you can use this as one of your diversifying assets, and usually 10% is enough, depending on what other things are in your portfolio. Real advocates of this will say things like well, you should have 30% or 40% in managed futures, and yeah, I suppose you could try that, but you're going to get way varied results then in a kind of portfolio like that, from a standard portfolio that's relying mostly on stocks to drive its returns and not managed futures. Anyway, I will link to all this in the show notes. You should go back and listen to episodes 55 and 57, if you haven't, and read that article, and hopefully that gives you enough to chew on on this topic, and thank you for your email.

Voices [16:04]

Frank. Frank, listen to me. I'm not what you think I am. I've made a big mistake in my life and I've got to be this way just once to fix it. They hang you for a thing like that, oh, but not. If you do it right and you're smart, frank, you'll think of a way Plenty of men have.

Voices [16:23]

Second off Second off.

Mostly Uncle Frank [16:43]

Second off we have an email from John.

Mostly Mary [16:46]

Here's Johnny, and John writes how might local currency ex-US fixed income funds, eg IGOV-EMLC, work in one of these portfolios as diversifiers?

Voices [17:10]

Wendy, I'm home.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:11]

All right, just for audience reference, the funds he's talking about. Igov is essentially international treasury bonds treasury bonds from countries that are not the United States and EMLC is largely a currency speculation. It's currencies and bonds in other jurisdictions. These do not actually work that well as diversifiers in a portfolio.

Voices [17:36]

Not going to do it Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

Mostly Uncle Frank [17:39]

And really the problem is not that they don't work at all, but that they kind of take up space in a portfolio that would be better occupied by something else. So, for instance, if you want exposure to these sorts of things, the easiest way to do it is actually to use managed futures, and then you'll get exposures to these sorts of assets. The main problem with them is that when they tend to do well, it's when the dollar is weak. When the dollar is strong, these kinds of things will do poorly. When the dollar is weak, these kinds of things will do well, like they do this year, but that is also true for almost all the other assets in your portfolio. That's why, when the dollar is strong, they often refer to it as the dollar wrecking ball, which you saw in 2022 that most assets fell in that kind of environment.

Mostly Uncle Frank [18:29]

Because any asset that's going to be priced in dollars, if the dollar becomes stronger, that is a big headwind to that asset, whether it's US stocks, international stocks, international bonds even US bonds can be affected by that, and gold and commodities as well most directly. So this exposure just ends up not being that useful. And if you take these kinds of funds and compare them to US treasuries in particular, and look at which one is more or less correlated with US stocks, you'll find these funds are actually more correlated with US stocks than US treasury bonds are, which is counterintuitive. But it has everything to do with this fact that most of the return out of these things comes from the strength or weakness in the dollar. So while you can use funds like this in a diversified portfolio, that space is probably better taken up by something else that does the job better than they do. You had only one job, especially if your portfolio is primarily driven by stock market returns, so hopefully that helps. Should send you straight back to Managed Futures and thank you for your email.

Voices [19:41]

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Mostly Uncle Frank [19:52]

Last off Last off, we have an email from Patrick.

Voices [19:57]

Hey Patrick, Counting up your change for a pack of Mermaid man and Barnacle Boy trading cards.

Voices [20:02]

No, I'm thinking about buying this book on counting Three, four. What's going to happen next?

Mostly Mary [20:11]

And Patrick writes Hi Frank, I noticed your front page explicitly links the now defunct Risk Parody Chronicles as a resource For additional resources. Check out Risk Parody Chronicles blog. Might be worth removing it as a dead link gives a bad impression. Love the podcast.

Mostly Uncle Frank [20:30]

Well, Patrick, guess what Guess what.

Voices [20:35]

We're putting the band back together. Now, who here at this table can honestly say that they played?

Voices [20:46]

any finer or felt any better than they did when they were with the blues brothers. You were the backbone, the nerve center of a great rhythm and blues band. You can make that live, breathe and jump again.

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:06]

Yes, Justin has resurfaced and has re-energized Risk Parody Chronicles.

Voices [21:12]

Yeah, baby, yeah.

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:14]

And, as fate would have it, he just sent me an email about that.

Voices [21:19]

Well, la-dee-frickin'-da.

Mostly Uncle Frank [21:22]

So I will be able to use his email to answer your email, and I won't have to lift a finger. I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working, and so here's Justin's email.

Mostly Mary [21:47]

Frank, just when I thought I was out Risk Parity pulled me back in. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. I'm pleased to announce that Risk Parity Chronicles has now risen again After an 18-month hiatus. I found that I missed having the outlet for my thoughts and wondering on asset allocation and have resuscitated the blog. Would you be so kind as to announce my presence with your authority.

Voices [22:13]

I want to bring the heater to announce my presence with authority. I'm not sure what.

Mostly Mary [22:16]

Announce my presence with authority. Subscription information is below. This time is a bit different, as the costs and back end work of the old blog were not something I wanted to repeat.

Mostly Mary [22:27]

I'm on Substack now, but committed to keeping the content free now and forever Like you, I don't really want another job and have found that the quickest way to destroy a hobby is to monetize it. And it's gone, Poof. Just want to share my ideas with the community and I'm happy to announce that, if they don't like it, I guarantee their money back. No questions asked.

Voices [22:53]

You know what Napoleon you?

Mostly Mary [22:54]

can leave. I don't have all that much posted yet, but do have some posts that may be of particular interest to your audience. One just posted an explainer on Shannon's Demon. That was inspired by listening to recent episodes of your show. I have heard you mention it on more than just a few occasions and each time I have thought to myself it might be really nice if Frank had a good link to send right about now. So I made one, or at least tried to. I also put up a version of the post as a YouTube video in case anyone is interested.

Mostly Mary [23:27]

Two, a recent question from John in episode 445 about rebalancing and leveraged funds sent me to test folio for about an hour trying some things out. Afterwards I decided to write up my findings in this post. The too-long-didn't-read version is that John did indeed find a particular case where annual rebalancing was better than threshold rebalancing. But slight tweaks yield different results and in the end I'm not sure we can say enough definitively on the subject. Three, part of the blog is and was tracking portfolios and I provide an overview of my 10, really six of mine with four benchmarks in this post. I'll update them quarterly, applying the 4% rule to each, to see how they fare. I too run hideous experiments so others don't have to. To wit, check out my Shannon's 50-50.

Voices [24:20]

You're insane gold member.

Mostly Mary [24:22]

My plan is to publish something once a week, sometimes posts that are new and current, and sometimes revised and refreshed versions of old posts from the old site. When those inevitable emails arrive asking when you're going to start doing this or that, to write something up or create a library of articles or something, please let them know that Risk Parody Chronicles is on the case.

Voices [24:43]

Yes.

Mostly Mary [24:44]

Thanks so much for mentioning my work in the past and I look forward to future collaborations and synergies that can help the DIY investor. Anyway, I'm hoping that my little project can be of some assistance to fellow travelers in this cozy little dive bar with the mismatched bar stools and old chipped and cracked mugs. Cheers and thanks for your help, Justin.

Voices [25:05]

The best, Jerry the best.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:07]

Well, it's great to have you back, Justin. We missed you.

Voices [25:11]

No, you're going to hear about it.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:14]

For those of you who don't know, justin is a very longtime listener but is also a math teacher in his professional life. He's a very sick man and so does very good maths.

Voices [25:26]

I am a scientist, not a philosopher.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:30]

And very good write-ups of a lot of the topics we talk about around here.

Mostly Mary [25:34]

Top drawer, really top drawer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [25:38]

And so, for those of you looking for that resource page or additional materials, I do heartily suggest that you go over and check out Risk Parity Chronicles, where you'll find a lot more information about these topics than I can do in a podcast. It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. And Justin's work fits squarely within our business model of leveraging the community to create great work at little or no cost.

Voices [26:07]

I got this inkling. I got this idea for a business model. I just want to run it past you. Here's how it would work. You get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work, but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20, sometimes 30 hours a week oh, but I'm not done. And then what they create? They give it away rather than sell it. It's going to be huge.

Mostly Uncle Frank [26:35]

Because if nobody's paying, then there's no conflicts of interest, at least not ones driven by pecuniary motivations. I will provide all of Justin's links in the show notes and we will put him back up there on the website at least the newly revamped website, as I expect Luke will be completing the work on that in the next month or so here.

Voices [27:16]

We have top men working on it right now. Who Top men?

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:28]

And I'll just be over here doing what I do best.

Voices [27:31]

Well, what about you now? What would you do? Nothing, nothing, huh, I would relax, I would sit on my ass all day, I would do nothing. And now for something completely different.

Mostly Uncle Frank [27:49]

And the something completely different is our weekly portfolio reviews. Of the eight sample portfolios you can find at wwwriskpartyreviewcom on the portfolios page, this is pretty much the worst video ever made. Just looking at the markets so far this year, the S&P 500, represented by VOO, is up 10.51% for the year. The NASDAQ 100, represented by QQQ, is up 13.22% for the year. Small cap value, represented by the fund VIOV, is down 1.69% for the year, continues to be the laggard. Gold continues to be the big winner.

Voices [28:26]

I love gold.

Mostly Uncle Frank [28:29]

Representative fund GLDM is up 27.2% for the year so far. Long-term treasury bonds, represented by VGLT, are up 2.18% for the year so far. Reits represented by the fund REET are up 2.18% for the year so far. Reits represented by the fund REET are up 5.16% for the year. Commodities, represented by the fund PDBC are down 0.15% for the year. Preferred shares, represented by the fund PFF are up 3.86% for the year so far and managed futures are managing to eke out a gain for the year so far. Representative fund DBMF is up 0.45% for the year so far.

Mostly Uncle Frank [29:05]

Moving to these portfolios, first one's this reference portfolio called the All Seasons that we keep around for comparison purposes. It's only 30% in stocks in the total stock market fund, 55% in intermediate and long-term treasury bonds and the remaining 15% in gold and commodities. It's up 0.48% for the month of August so far. It's up 6.99% year-to-date and up 16.15% since inception in July 2020. Moving to these kind of bread and butter portfolios, first one's gold and butterfly. This one is 40% in stocks divided into a total stock market fund and a small cap value fund, 40% in bonds divided into long and short-term treasuries and the remaining 20% in gold. Gldm it's up 1.72%. Month to date. It's up 8.58% year to date and up 45.42% since inception in July 2020.

Mostly Uncle Frank [30:00]

Next one's gold in ratio, this one is 42% in stocks divided into a large cap growth fund and a small cap value fund, 26% in long-term treasury bonds, 16% in gold, 10% in managed futures and 6% in cash in a money market fund. It's up 1.68% month-to-date. It's up 8.11% month-to-date. It's up 8.11% year-to-date and up 40.49% since inception, july 2020. Next one's a risk parity ultimate. It's kind of our kitchen sink here. I'm not going to go through all 12 of these funds, but it's up 1.68% month-to-date for August. It's up 7.45% year-to-date and and up 28.23% since inception in July 2020. Now moving to these experimental portfolios.

Voices [30:45]

Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave With a box of scraps.

Mostly Uncle Frank [30:53]

Where we do hideous things with leveraged funds.

Voices [30:56]

You have a gambling problem.

Mostly Uncle Frank [30:58]

Don't try this at home.

Voices [31:00]

Uh, what the money in your account? It didn't do too well.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:04]

It's gone. First one's the accelerated permanent portfolio. This one's 27.5% in a levered bond fund, tmf, 25% in UPRO, that's a levered S&P 500 fund, 25% in PFFV, a preferred shares fund, and 22.5% in gold GLDM. It's up 1.32% month-to-date. It's up 9.04% year-to-date and up 10.16% since inception in July 2020. Next one's the most levered and least diversified of all these portfolios and the worst performer. It's called the aggressive 50-50, which is half stocks and half bonds. So it's one-third in a levered stock fund, upro, one-third in a levered bond fund, tmf, and the remaining third divided into preferred shares and an intermediate treasury bond fund. As Ballast, it's up 1.5% month-to-date for the month of August. It's up 4.58% year-to-date and down 7.89% since inception in July 2020.

Mostly Uncle Frank [31:59]

Next one's the levered golden ratio. This one is 35% in a composite fund called NTSX, that is, the S&P 500 and Treasury bonds levered, up 1.5 to 1. 15% in an intermediate small cap fund, avdv, 20% in gold GLDM, 10% in KMLM, which is a managed futures fund, 10% in TMF, a levered bond fund, and the remaining 10% divided into UDOW and UTSL, which are levered funds that follow the Dow and Utilities Index respectively. It's up 1.9% month-to-date. It's up 12.24% year-to-date. It's actually leaving the pack this year and it's up 7.28% since inception in July 2021. And the last one is our newest one, the Optra portfolio One portfolio to rule them all. This is a return stack style portfolio, so it's 16% in a levered stock fund UPRO, 24% in AVGEV, which is a worldwide value fund, 24% in GOVZ, which is a treasury strips fund, and the remaining 36% divided into gold and managed futures. It's up 2.00% month-to-date, it's up 10.33% year-to-date and up 13.54% since inception in July 2024. To 5.4% since inception in July 2024.

Voices [33:29]

And that concludes our weekly portfolio reviews. So you can wake up from your nap. Now you take my dreams, like the one that you just interrupted. It was marvelous I was foreclosing the mortgage on a lifelong friend and I was creating a poverty pocket right in the heart of Beverly Hills downtown.

Mostly Uncle Frank [33:48]

But now I see our signal is beginning to fade. I was remiss in answering the first email because Postmaster went to the front of the email line by making a donation to the Father McKenna Center. As most of you know, we don't have any sponsors on this podcast. We do have a charity we support. It's called the Father McKenna Center. It supports hungry and homeless people in Washington DC. Full disclosure. I'm on the board of the center and am the current treasurer.

Mostly Uncle Frank [34:12]

But if you give to the charity, you get to go to the front of the email line. Two ways to do that you can go to the Father McKenna website and donate directly there, or you can become one of our patrons on Patreon. To do that, go to the Risk Parity Radio website and go to the support page and you can sign up through the link there. Either way, you get to go to the front of the email line. Just make sure you mention it in your email, as the Postmaster has done here. The Postmaster has done here. And speaking of emails, if you have comments or questions for me, please send them to frankatriskpartyradarcom. That email is frankatriskpartyradarcom. Or you can go to the website, wwwriskpartyradarcom. Put your message into the contact form and I'll get it that way Eventually. If you haven't had a chance to do it, please go to your favorite podcast provider and like subscribe. Give me some stars, a follow, a review that would be great. Okay, thank you once again for tuning in. This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Party Radio Signing off.

Voices [35:12]

Keep on, don't let money, don't let money change you. Oh my God.

Voices [35:26]

Keep on telling you, Keep on, don't let money don't let money change you.

Voices [35:35]

oh my God, Keep on changing, changing up your mind.

Voices [35:40]

Keep on, keep on changing, changing up your mind. Keep on changing, changing up your mind. Keep on telling, telling, telling y'all Keep on, don't let money change you, almighty God. Keep on telling y'all, keep on, don't let money change you.

Mostly Mary [36:03]

All my stuff. Keep on changing, changing up your mind. Keep on changing, changing up your mind, Keep on telling y'all people don't let money change you. All my stuff. The Risk Parody Radio Show is hosted by Frank Vasquez. The content provided is for entertainment and informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax or legal advice. Please consult with your own advisors before taking any actions based on any information you have heard here, making sure to take into account your own personal circumstances.