In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, explores the importance of diversification and why blindly following the S&P 500 may not be the best investment strategy. While many investors believe in a simple, passive approach, history has shown that overreliance on any single asset class can be risky – especially in unpredictable market cycles.
Key highlights of the episode include:
• Lessons learned from the Lost Decade (2000-2010) and how a stagnant S&P 500 impacted investors.
• Why the four largest companies in the world in 1989 – based in Japan – led to a 30-year bear market.
• The role of alternative investments such as private equity, private debt, and infrastructure in modern portfolios.
• How PAX Financial Group approaches diversification to balance risk and opportunity in today’s market.
For additional insights and to learn how PAX Financial Group can guide your financial journey, visit http://www.PAXFinancialGroup.com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone who could benefit!
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature. It’s not intended to provide any specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. So, I was talking with a friend the other day. Not a client, a friend.
He’s been a longtime friend. He’s retiring. He’s never used us before. And that’s all good because he’s a very, very smart guy. He’s actually a CPA, CFP. Just a friend. And I said, “Are you going to be okay?” You know, being frank, I’m in the financial business. I ask frank questions sometimes about money. He said, “Yeah, I’ve been investing in equities or also known as stocks, for 40 years. I think I’ll be okay.”
And you think about it like 40 years of buying stocks. Like, if somebody tells you that I’ve been investing for 40 years and buying stocks, you know they’re going to be okay, right? And we think about where you’re at right now in life, you likely still have 40 years. Some of you guys, like maybe, maybe not.
But I want you to just think, there’s that old saying the best time to plant a tree is, you know, ten years ago. But second-best time is today. Or the best time to invest in real estate was ten years ago. It’s like the best time is today. The same with stocks. Maybe it was better, and we wish we would have done it 10, 15, 20 years ago.
But today is the day I really want you to think about being more aggressive with your investing strategy. And I say that obviously working with your advisor, but I thought that was really cool. Like, I just had a lot of confidence that this guy was going to be able to retire comfortably. Now, when you do retire, the strategy has to be modified a little bit because it’s a different phase of life.
In the first phase, you’re accumulating and then the other phase you’re distributing and just some different dynamics involved. I couldn’t help but ask myself, and I think it might have even been the same day I was listening to Jim Cramer. You guys know who Jim Cramer is? The guy with the buttons and he yells. And he was telling, he was telling his listeners, you know, buy the S&P 500, there’s a little hypocrisy in his messaging, but I won’t go there right now.
The main thing I want to say is it’s not uncommon for many, many people, especially in an editorial sense, to suggest that the best investing strategy is to buy the S&P 500, which is a low-cost approach to buying the stock market. And almost every day, I think that is the best approach. But, as geography and history being my guide, I feel uncomfortable with putting all our clients into the S&P 500.
Part of the reason is I lived through, and I worked through what’s called the Lost Decade, which was from 2000 to 2010, where that S&P 500 had actually negative returns. And so, people who were needing returns to afford their standard of living and to grow their money, that entire decade was the Lost Decade. That hit home for me.
In fact, 2010 and 2011 were one of the hardest times in my investing career because I started to question everything I believed to be true. The good news is, is that taking inventory at that time and reflecting and spending a lot of time wrestling with things, I think it’s made us a better company.
But it was that Lost Decade that leads me to believe that if I were to put all our clients’ money in the S&P 500, I think that we would be putting our clients lives at risk. And then I also reflect on internationally, if you look at Japan in 1989, you know, right now we’ve got these big companies, Nvidia, Facebook, Google, in 1989, Japan actually had the four largest companies in the world.
Some of you guys remember the 80s. A lot of us, and I guess I was young at the time, of course, but a lot of us were concerned about the global competition with Japan. It wasn’t China at the time, it was Japan. And, sure enough, they had the four largest companies in the entire world. And so, if you would have bought the Japan stock market in 1989, you would have had to live through not a 5-year bear market or 10-year bear market, but a 30-year bear market where you would have gotten hardly anything in terms of total return.
So, putting clients’ money solely in the S&P 500 at first glance, I think about this every day. I promise you guys that, like I think about it, but I just can’t do it because you have these periods of time where it does not work, and our futures depend on having some element of returns to our portfolio. So, as a result, there’s sometimes where we collectively get frustrated about not being able to outperform the S&P 500.
And then sometimes it’s okay. To me, it still should encompass the majority of your portfolios. In other words, I do have deep convictions. And you’ve heard me say this before. The best portfolio is an undiversified portfolio when you’re right, and I say that tongue in cheek, meaning that, honestly, the best investment you can make is in yourself.
And that’s in education. That’s in business. But the second best to me would be investing in companies, good companies, doing good things, manufacturing products and services that our world needs. And the demographics support that those companies will continue doing good things and servicing the marketplace. So, I love owning companies and I love doing it through the publicly traded market, even the private market.
So, here’s the thing about it, though. So, diversification has to be a part of the equation because of what we talked about in the lost decade and what happened to Japan. Those two examples are reasons that we diversify and don’t just own the S&P 500. We own other things. And sometimes those other things zig when some things zig, some things zag, and some things zig zig and some things zag zag.
And so, I want to tell you about what the future might look like when it comes to diversification. In fact, the future’s already here. It just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet. So, when we think about diversification, we think about owning stocks and bonds and then cash as being an option. So many, many times in the investment world, we talk about owning 60% stocks and 40% bonds and cash.
That’s a normal construction from what was developed by this guy named Markowitz years ago. That’s called Modern Portfolio theory. And so much of the industry has been built around this idea. But again, the future is right now because of technological advances and academic insights. And frankly, there’s just some industry trailblazers that are really shaking things up in terms of diversification.
We want to rely on historical data to be able to make good investment decisions. And then we want to look at what’s going on in the future and consider that as well. So, diversification is the recipe – and stocks, bonds, and these other things are the ingredients. And then you put them in the blender, and you get something different.
And it’s kind of interesting because we measure investments like we measure risk. That’s called beta. We measure performance. It’s called alpha. And when you put things in the blender, it’s kind of strange because you could put all these hot ingredients, like let’s say on a spicy scale, 1 to 10. They’re 9’s. With investments, you can put a bunch of ingredients that are 9s in a blender and then stir them up, and then the hot meter comes out as a 7 or 8.
It’s kind of a strange thing, and I won’t get into the science behind it. But when you construct portfolios and the science behind constructing portfolios, you can actually put together a portfolio that has, what we call a good risk reward profile. So, it has actually an improved reward and a lower risk profile. So, there’s some science behind it.
But now we’re starting to think about the future, and we’re starting to think a little bit about the art. And considering these technological advances, these academic insights. And even, like I said, the industry trailblazers. And so, I want to address eight different ingredients that you could put in your recipe on a go forward that we’re just thinking more deeply about going forward and whether or not they get adopted into your portfolio today.
Just so you know, we, at the very least at PAX, are kind of thinking about these things and talking to industry leaders and researching and when we’re comfortable, when we have enough conviction, then, you know, you may see us add some of those ingredients to the recipe. Definitely, considering the historical research that’s done by Markowitz and letting that be the framework.
But then, you’ll often see us what we do is satellite your portfolio. So, adding a little bit of spice here and there. So, let’s talk. I’ve got eight different diversifiers that maybe we haven’t thought of in a while. And so, I want to talk about these eight diversifiers. Let’s start with number one. This is one that’s been in the headlines quite a bit.
And that’s crypto. You know, we have, I don’t know if there’s any other RIA’s, registered investment advisors that offer crypto the way we do. We offer more than just an exchange traded fund. We actually have cold storage crypto, which is a completely different security mechanism. And we’ve been offering that for a while.
We feel comfortable with it. We just don’t want to have too much in it because it doesn’t have, it’s hard to make sense of it. In fact, a lot of the catalysts for crypto has been headline events. So, it’s like, it’s actually just kind of boring right now. Crypto is boring because there’s no headline event. So, I feel like every time it goes up, it’s because some headline is driving, hit some cataclysmic event.
And so, it’s just kind of a peculiar one that I think most of us now are like, okay, I’ll own a little bit, but mainly we just want to keep it under that 5%. And most people target about 1 or 2% of their portfolio. So that’s number one. The second one I’ll talk about is private equity. And this one is often used as a replacement for that small cap piece of your portfolio.
And what we’re seeing now is just fewer and fewer IPOs, initial public offerings, and a fewer number of companies are going public. And so, as a result, they’re staying private for longer. And clients can now tap into the private equity market. It’s no longer just for rich people. So, we welcome that. We think that it’s good to be able to get the technology to such a place and the regulatory environment, such a place that other people can access private equity.
So, we’re just trying to figure out how to do that more and more. There’re some nuances for us, we even have to think operationally. How do you do some of these things? The third one is the private debt market. So, the banks there’s this Basel Act, I’m not saying that right. Basel Accord is really the right language.
But anyways, the banks have, the regulatory environment is in such a place that lending is becoming more challenging. And hopefully that frees up in the new administration. But the private markets outside of the traditional banking system have knocked down the doors that were closed to the banks and they’ve started lending money to the businesses that need it to be able to grow.
And that’s called the private debt markets. The return profiles are very attractive, and we’re starting to introduce that. And that’s becoming one of those diversifiers to client portfolios. So, there’s three, crypto one, not in an order like not a priority order, but cryptocurrencies. You could own 1 to 5%. Private equity, check with your advisor, that may work.
Private debt, that’s a big one right now. One of the biggest in the marketplace. They also call it private credit. Number four is hedge funds. You know, I got to say, I’ve never been a big fan of hedge funds because the profile of hedge funds are high fees, no liquidity, no transparency. And, frankly, returns haven’t been that attractive.
And every now and again, they just pop these big returns. And right when they get these big returns, they show up on CNBC every week and they’re, you know, that publicity will carry them for ten years. I just haven’t found hedge funds to be in attractive space. I’m sure there’s 1 or 2 out there that may make sense, but we just haven’t introduced him to our clients’ portfolios because they seem more like a compensation system for somebody in New York than they do in investment for our clients.
But they are being used. And maybe one day we’ll find something that works. But right now, hedge funds are not for us, but for other people that might be a diversifier. Gold, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve seen the returns on the gold the past two years. They’ve actually outperformed the S&P 500. Gold’s been amazing. And we’ve used gold quite a bit.
You know, it’s better, I guess you could go… So, all these commercials that all these talking heads have, they all have gold commercials. So, I call like 4 or 5 of them up and try to understand the nuances behind gold. And you know, which ones charge fees?
Which ones, you know, we’ll have insurance and storage and there’s all these little things that come with gold. It doesn’t make it really easy to buy, but gold, if you actually own the gold, that’s kind of cool. It could just be a shiny rock for you. Or it could be a really important investment. Historically, gold, just if you look at like, long term track records, it hasn’t done that.
Well, I guess it depends on what you think of gold. If you think of it in an apocalyptic scenario where you’re going to shave off some of your brick, it might be better to own some liquor or guns. Yeah, probably liquor is the best investment in an apocalyptic event.
Gold’s just okay. But again, you can own a little bit and that’s fine. You can also buy it through an exchange traded fund if you want to own it that way. So that’s number five. Number six, are real assets, really looking into this a little bit more. So obviously, you know, being in Texas, a lot of our clients have land, and in farmland and ranches.
That’s good stuff. We’re actually just exploring the opportunity to own that in a different way, so you can have it where, you know, you can own even timberland or farmland through a fund. So, it’s those that, like us, didn’t inherit a bunch of land, you can have access to that asset through like a pool of other people.
So, that’s becoming a real possibility going forward for a fund that owns real assets. That’s kind of cool. So, that’s becoming more prevalent. Number seven, infrastructure. This is becoming really, really big. In fact, I was listening to the markets this morning and there was somebody on there talking about like data centers, transport, utilities, communication, renewable power, all these things that make our whole system work.
And so how do you access that? If we have a growing economy, how do you get to be able to participate in infrastructure growth? And so, there’s ways to do that too. So that’s a diversifier also. And the final one is just more eclectic strategies that are coming out, namely income strategies. In fact, there’s a strategy now where you have home equity.
And let’s say you need some money, but you don’t want to borrow. You don’t want to do a home equity loan. There are actually companies out there that will actually give you money, but now they own a piece of your home, and they don’t require anything until you sell your home. So, they’re like, okay, here’s $100,000.
And when you sell your home, we get the appreciation. And I’ve never done those before. But these things are happening in the marketplace. There’s actually something called an income shared agreement with students where, you know, they’ll pay for college as long as they get a percentage of your income when you graduate. So, there’s a lot of different things happening, litigation finances, you know, people you know about to get a big lawsuit.
They’ll get money in advance. There’s lots of things that are happening out there. Some of them are really peculiar, and we’re not going to, you know, integrate high risk stuff into our clients’ portfolios. But we do pay attention to what the marketplace is offering. The bottom line is this, despite all the kinds of interesting things that are happening right now in the investment market that we’re paying attention to, still owning good companies over an extended period of time is really, I think is the best bet long term.
That’s what the evidence shows. And I continue to lean on the evidence. But because we’ve had those experiences, you know, look at Japan in 1989, even in the lost decade, diversifying beyond just the S&P 500 is still a priority. Because even though there’s going to be some years where we have to say, man, I’m sorry I didn’t outperform the S&P 500, our primary objective is to grow your money over time and compound it in such a way that it meets your goals.
And so doing so means that we have to diversify. And so, if I had a crystal ball, I’d know exactly what to do. And I probably wouldn’t even be talking on this podcast right now. But we don’t. So, we diversify and stay focused long term. And remember, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
Resources:
Listen on:
