Key Points From This Episode:

• The start of the ETF boom [0:00:50]

• When proponents of active management realize they should index [0:02:30]

• Cutting wasteful expenses without sacrificing happiness [0:05:20]

• Pulling off a successful downsizing [0:08:32]

• Housing is not an investment [0:09:02]

• The real cost of owning a home [0:09:58]

• Defining the ideal lifestyle [0:10:30]

• Digging into Canadian consumer debt levels [0:12:30]

• The real debt to income ratio for debtors in Canada [0:14:02]

• Is mortgage debt always “good” debt? [0:14:44]

• The rising cost of debt and its effect on the economy [0:16:20]

• Credit card rates are justified [0:19:18]

• Choosing the right credit card [0:22:40]

• Never pay an annual fee on a credit card [0:23:00]

• The boom-bust lending cycle [0:25:30]

• Bankers saw the financial crisis coming, but had to keep going [0:26:05]

• Focusing on the things that you can control [0:30:19]

Read the Transcript:

We were just laughing before we started recording this that I actually found the article that triggered you to reach out to me back in 2002. This is the beginning of the ETF revolution and we had three or four years into transitioning from the old mutual fund world into the index type world. And there's an article in the Ottawa Citizen. And you said you knew it was on Sunday and sure enough was Sunday of 2002 in March.

Well, it's funny cause I couldn't tell you what year it was, might be able to tell you that it was March, but I remembered it was a Sunday, very, very clearly. And it's funny because the background for the response, and I think I saw the article on Sunday morning, wrote you on Sunday afternoon. I think you got back either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning and we've been sort of speak together ever since. The Genesis for my excitement was really, I spent years previous to that working in the mutual fund industry. And that was a real eye opener for me. Enjoyed my time. It was the go-go years. Really, there were no rules at the time.

You took your top performers to exotic locales and bought everything you could for them. And it was, by today's standards, virtually reprehensible, but it was still, it was a fun time to be there. I learned a ton about investing, but there's two things I walked away from my time in the mutual fund business having learned. One is I had a real distrust for your run of the mill advisor. I know it sounds like a horrible thing to say, but I saw so many people kind of acting self-interested.

Because you’re on the sell side.

I was on the sell side. And I mean, I saw what people did to qualify for those conferences and what have you. And I always wondered like, "This can't possibly be good for the client." So that was my first thing. The second thing is we were active money managers. That's what we did and I won't name names, but we had one star money manager who was really big at the time. And you start to realize that money management is about regression to the mean, because they start out small and they can pick and they can really be choosy about which equities they invest in. And the performance is great. And then people like me come in and say, "Okay, well, if we like this at 100 million in assets, just think what it would be if we had $2 billion in assets. We shovel in the money." And of course you shovel in more money, performance starts to regress towards the mean, because they can't be as choosy.

And before you know it, you've got a high fee fund, that's got supposedly a star manager that's producing average performance.

Because you were there through the late 90s, right?

It was, I would say, kind of mid to late 90s. It was the go-go years. It was a fun time to be in the business. But as an investor, when I left, I actually took all my money and started investing in myself and in equities. And I knew it was a horrible way to do things because I'm a horrible investor, but I actually felt more comfortable in my poor investing skills than I did handing money over to somebody who I didn't trust. And it was only when I saw that article on that Sunday morning that I went, "Finally an advisor who has a philosophy I think I can live with." So I reached out to you and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Yeah, no kidding. It's been such a massive change since then because that was right at the beginning. I mean the article featured Howard Atkinson who went on to many, many years of leading the charge on the ETF world.

Yeah, it was, it was just, just, just starting. And that was one of the things I had learnt in my time in the mutual fund business was all of those statistics that things like DFA and whatever and now based on the Nobel prize thinking, and I just saw the article and I went, "That's what I want," and been there ever since and never looked back.

So interesting that being on the ground in the active management space is what pushed you toward indexing.

Oh, absolutely. I'm not sure how many people that are in the active space would kind of testify to that today, but I suspect many of them are probably ETF investors themselves.

So you recently retired.

I retired almost two years ago now.

 

And so I've seen you prepare for this over the past number of years. Why don't you describe to listeners what you did to prepare for the retirement?

Yeah, I mean, as obviously most people recognize, I mean, you don't prepare for retirement a week or a month beforehand. It was a long-term journey. The decision to retire when I did was actually quite spontaneous. It's not like I had planned on retiring at 51, but when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped on it. Preparations, the first, and I know a few weeks ago you had one guest who said similar things, the first and most important thing that anybody can do, I think, to prepare for retirement is just manage their spending. It's really-

And you were ruthless as Doug was. I know both. I know you’re pretty ruthless.

I was ruthless. In fairness and I apologize that this is too much detail, but I worked for a company that was bought out in 2006. And as part of the buy out, the new buyers were nice enough to take my salary down by 35% and replace it with stock options, which, because of the crisis, ended up being worthless. But nonetheless, when your salary goes down by 35%, it's a wake-up call. So we were very fortunate to have that happen. I'm not sure I would have said that at the time.

But all of a sudden, I remember sitting down with my wife and going through and say, "Okay, what don't we need to spend?" And you start to realize how much spending is just wasteful.

We were very fortunate. We paid off all of our debt at that time, but little things like on weekends, I'd get bored and I'd go shopping just out of boredom and you buy stuff you don't need. So we started rationalizing expenses very, very, well, early on. And that proved really, really, really beneficial. And you have to be ruthless and you have to be very careful looking at what it is that you spend your money on and recognizing a lot of the stuff you're spending money on it doesn't make you happier and doesn't really provide a whole lot of value. So we did that.

 

That's an interesting insight because so many people don't live within their means and you were living well, well below what you could have spent money on. How did you get to the point of happiness through that?

Well, I was very fortunate. I was making a good income to begin with and if I couldn't survive on my income alone, there was going to be a problem at the level I was living. So essentially very similar to your guest a few weeks ago, when I got bonuses at the end of the year, those pretty much went entirely to savings. And then we tried to save, I'd say, 15, 20% of our pre-tax income on an annual basis. And again we weren't making $45,000 a year. So we had the luxury of being able to do that. But we splurged on a few things here and there, but very deliberately. And we were just miserly on a whole bunch of others. And you start to realize that a lot of that stuff, it wasn't getting you any happiness to begin with. It wasn't getting you what you might thought it was it was going to get you in the first place. So why not just cut it out?

It’s a great insight.

Yeah. I mean a great example. It sounds stupid and petty, but we had somebody who came and cleaned the house every couple of weeks and it was a few hundred dollars every visit and we kind of went, "Wait a second." We were fortunate. My wife was at home. We're healthy, we're active, we'll clean our own house. And you start to add those up, a few hundred dollars here, a few hundred dollars. I never bought a cup of coffee. I never bought lunch. I always packed my own lunch. It was convenient. I didn't have to schlep down to a food court to buy lunch.

You add those things up. It's usually not the thousand dollar purchases that you cut out. Oftentimes it's the, as, if you go back to the wealthy barber, the two, $3 a day that you spend that add up really quickly.

 

Right. Part of your retirement plan was downsizing, which I think is something a lot of people talk about. I don't know how many people actually do it successfully. You've done it, I would, say successfully. How have you found the change in lifestyle?

Love it. Absolutely love it. I mean, the change was precipitated as much by retirement as it was by recognizing that we just had way too much house. Our kids are more or less out of the house at this juncture. And we had a fairly large property, just the two of us with all kinds of amenities that we weren't using. And I always find it, maybe to editorialize for a second, I find it entertaining to watch people who think that your house is an investment. And over the past couple of decades, it's kind of performed like an investment but at the end of the day, it's housing. And, well, some people in our neighborhood said, "Well, it's your home-"

And we were paying to maintain, to renovate, to heat, paying taxes for space that we just weren't using. We maybe were using a third of the space. So the decision to downsize was remarkably easy to do and having moved on, people ask us, "Do you miss your old house? What do you miss?" And my wife said this a few weeks ago and I laughed because I thought about, and I agree. I think the biggest thing we miss is we had a garburator in the old house. Of course, they're illegal now. We don't have a garburator, but that's it. I mean, a garburator. If that's the biggest thing you miss out of your old house is the garburator you're doing okay. So it's worked out really wonderfully.

It's probably amounted to, and I think, Cameron, you and I were chatting about this, it's probably when you calculate the expense savings and the investment income that you're likely to earn on the money you pulled out of your property, it's probably a 20, $25,000 a year decision and we're not sacrificing. We're living in a really nice townhouse, 2,500 square feet. I mean, yes, it was downsizing, but, I mean, we're by most standards living in the lap of luxury. So it's all good.

But now it's more urban. So that's really changed your lifestyle also.

It has. We went down, we got rid of a car. We now walk to a bunch of places. We love the urban feel. We loved the old neighborhood. We had great neighbors, great environment, but it was suburban. You had to get into a car to go everywhere. Now we're downtown. We walk, we can walk to get a cup of coffee. We can walk to dinner. We meet our neighbors. We have great facilities that the city provides near us, parks and what have you. So we just absolutely love it.

Such a good point about the maintenance cost and the renovations. Most people are viewing that as an investment and they do, but it's an illusion. You're putting money into the house to maintain its value. You're not increasing its value.

Well, and if you kind of put it in accounting terms, you're basically making up for depreciation.

And yeah, it's really nice. But as we found out, our house was renovated over the time that we were in it for pretty much from top to bottom, but those renovations only last a certain amount of time. So you get to the point where you have to redo them. And we were looking forward and saying, "In the next five years, we're going to have to start to redo this kind of stuff." And again, it's a lot of money and we just weren't up to it. So the position to downsize was made.

Do you have the same philosophy or thoughts around the Toronto ownership versus the Ottawa ownership?

Well, I, yeah, I do. The Toronto condo was housing. I commuted back and forth for a number of years while I worked in Toronto and my condo was where I lived. So again, it was housing. And when I retired, my son was still studying in Toronto. So we figured, "Well, we're not paying rent for you someplace downtown. You can live in the condo." So he's been occupying it. It's not part of my investment portfolio. It's just there. And when we can get rid of it, we'll get rid of it and put it back in. I don't feel that real estate is a great part of an investment portfolio. If I did want to do it, I'd be more tempted to buy something like an REIT or do something along those lines, which has some degree of diversification, versus huge chunk of money in one property in one neighborhood in one... I mean, God only knows what could happen.

That's all great. Great conversation so far but I do want to transition to your thoughts on Canadian debt levels, which I think you've got a lot to say about. So I guess just to kick it off, how do you feel about consumer debt levels in Canada right now?

I have been concerned about consumer debt levels for a number of years, and I find it somewhat entertaining that people are kind of coming around to that point of view now. It's been a long time coming and the writing's been on the wall. Just full disclosure, I spent 20 years in the credit card space. So I was one of the people who contributed to this debt mess that we're now in, too, so I have to say that in the interest of full disclosure, but really the situation we're in now is concerning. Is it catastrophic like the financial crisis was back in 2007, 2008? No, I don't think it is, but it is worrisome. And it's worrisome for a segment of our population that can probably least afford to be hit. You hear headline numbers and I have to say, I get very frustrated by the mainstream media's reporting of simple metrics.

The number that comes out, depending on which version you want to see, as debt to income levels of 169, 170%, 171%, whatever the case may be. That's accurate. But as people say, statistics don't lie, people lie with statistics. That's an average across the entire population. RBC had a publication that came out a little while ago talking about 35% of Canadians are debt free.

And they're getting Lumped into the average. So if you back them out that 171 becomes 260.

So the average debt to income ratio for someone who is carrying debt is 260%. And that just to put in perspective, the average, the 171, was 118 pre-crisis. So we've seen a 42% increase in debt loads. Now the good news is interest rates were so low, people accumulated this debt and their servicing costs were flat to slightly down, maybe in the last little while it's started to tick up, but people were having no problem servicing that debt. But when you got the Bank of Canada rate hovering near zero, and people are piling on the debt, you know at some point it's going to go up and that's in my concern.

This is total credit card debt and home equity lines of credit and mortgages, right?

Correct. This is the entire balance sheet.

A lot of that’s mortgage debt, right?

That is mortgage debt. And in fairness, most of the increase in that has been mortgage debt. And people talk about mortgage debt as if it's absolutely non-troublesome.

Good debt, right?

And it's good debt. And it's hard to completely disagree. However, if you look at certain marketplaces, Toronto and Vancouver most notably, people are acquiring crazy levels of debt to buy houses to get on the property ladder and I think your guest a couple of weeks ago talked about it. These people are taking on huge burdens, and you're already starting to see with 100 basis point increase in the Bank of Canada rate, you're already seeing people highly stressed carrying that debt. I think it was Ipsos did a research study that just got published a little while ago, 44% of Canadians are already struggling living paycheck to paycheck. So I'm not going to be the person to sit there and say, "There's going to be a catastrophic real estate meltdown." I don't think that's the case. I don't think there's going to be a massive mortgage meltdown because I think people will protect their investment because they're living in the house. And in many cases, unless you just happened to buy the house in the last 12 months, they have equity that they want to protect.

But the reality is when their cashflow gets squeezed, when the income statement gets squeezed, something's going to have to give and respectfully, I think that the unsecured part of the spectrum is where that's going to be felt first. And that's the place that I spent my time in.

And that's the credit card side. And that's why I was worried about it because you think about it when people don't have the money and again, the average Canadian has already seen their annual debt servicing costs go by 500 bucks in the last 12 months. And that's expected to go up by $1,200 a year by the end of this year and $2,400 a year by 2023. With incomes being more or less stagnant, that's money that people just don't have. So something's going to have to give. They're probably not going to miss the mortgage payment. They're probably going to continue to make their auto payment. What's not going to get made? That credit card payment's not going to get paid.

So the credit card debt change is a leading indicator.

I think it is. And in fairness, it's been very, very, very steady and good for the last number of years. So people are looking at the metrics and saying, "It's all good." The problem is, is that that can change awfully quickly as we saw with the financial crisis and when it starts to spike, it's not a small increase like mortgage delinquencies might be. You're talking, going from loss rates of two and a half, 3% to loss rates of 6% plus. So it's a big movement.

 

Wow. Rob Kerrick wrote a piece recently that's kind of along these lines, but he was talking about the growing balances of HELOCs around the country. And his hypothesis is that people, because it's the most expensive real estate markets where people will have the most growing HELOC balances, so his hypothesis was that people are using the HELOCs to cover their living expenses. Obviously that's not sustainable long-term. But with the data that you've been talking about, do you think that the banks will tighten up their lending practices HELOCs and other things like that?

It's a great question. I don't think the banks will do anything outside of regulatory intervention. And that's what the government's been doing the last few years, which is, frankly, appropriate and long overdue. And the reason the banks won't do it, simplistically, is if one of them does it, another one's likely to see it as an opportunity to gain market share.

So it has to be done in a way that's done across the board. And that's where the regulator comes in. My big complaint is I don't think the Canadian regulators have been on the ball to the extent that they should have been. The US regulators weren't in 2006, 2007 and the years leading up to it. But having worked for American banks through the financial crisis, I can tell you that the US regulators learned their lessons and they're on the ball today. Having worked for companies that straddle the Canadian border, I can tell you, there's a huge difference with how the regulators approach banking supervision in the US and how they approach it in Canada and the Canadian regulators take a much more laid back approach.

So again, you've started to see a movement over the last little while. I think it's going to get better. I don't expect to blow up. I'm not a sky is falling kind of guy, but I think in the unsecured space, you're going to see some trouble in the years ahead. That's my prediction. And I think there are certain segments of our society that are going to suffer very, very seriously as interest rates go up. And it's not a small segment. We've seen articles going back to kind of the space that we all live in today. I think there's a lot of people are going to struggle to retire.

 

So how do you think consumers will handle these rising rates? So they're going to have greater default rates. So what does that mean for credit card companies? They increase the interest rates to higher risk categories of consumers, higher defaults, stop spending, consumerism goes down?

And we're seeing that already. I mean, if you kind of look at what's been happening in the last little while, there was an article in today's Globe, for example, that talked about exactly that how, hey, the good news is that income's started to come down a little bit. The bad news is consumer spend is probably not going to be able to carry the economy the way it did through the last 10 years. So yes, absolutely, that's the case. Is that difficult for the economy? Yes. Is it good for the individuals? Yeah. I mean, people have to start to pay down their debt. What's going to start to happen, and it's interesting, there's a statistic out there that's really deceptive because it makes people feel better about our predicament, which is, "Hey, debt's increasing, but net worth is also increasing," which is absolutely true. The problem is that net worth is mostly in real estate and, as we know, that's very illiquid.

So I don't know of a lot of people who are going to be really keen on selling their house and moving their kids out of their house in order to pay off their credit card bills. So back to the earlier point, I do think that what you're going to start to see is as more people filing for things like consumer proposals, which is kind of a soft bankruptcy, Chapter 11 type bankruptcy if you were to think about it in US terms, and that will allow people to wipe out the debt that they can't afford and kind of get back on their feet, but there's going to be a day of reckoning and, Cameron, to your point, somebody is going to have to pay for that. And since it's not the people who can't afford it, it's probably going to be the people who have been responsible, who can afford it, who are going to have to pay higher share of the freight either through higher fees or higher interest rates.

 

But this is why they charge high rates in the first place.

Absolutely. I mean, I always used to laugh when I was in credit card space. It was a regular occurrence that every five years or so the NDP would start to bang the drums about credit card rates being too high and we should legislate them to five or 6%, something a little bit more reasonable. The challenge you run into is mortgage rates can be 6%, credit card rates can't be 6% because it's an unsecured debt. It's a loan of last resort. And generally the people who borrow tend to carry higher risk levels and you need that higher rate to offset your default rate. So it just won't work. And if you lower the rate too low, what ends up happening is all the people who actually need the credit end up not being able to get the credit.

Banks will just step on the brake and pull right back. And the people who have lots of asset and don't need to borrow will have credit cards and everybody else will be stuck.

 

And you can't make it up on the merchant fees, can you, and those?

No, the merchant fees are going in the wrong direction if you're a bank or they're going in the right direction, if you're a retailer, I mean, the reality of it is the retailers have very effectively, and now that I'm out of the industry I can say that, rightfully lobbied the government to reduce the amount of fees that they get charged by the big banks-

Even on a premium card?

It's still more on a premium card, but it's been reduced overall.

So, there was an agreement that came out a few years ago that basically said that, on average, the interchange rate had to be 1.5%, which was quite a, well, I shouldn't say quite meaningful. It was a meaningful reduction. And they recently agreed to lower that average down to 1.4%. So it's coming down. If you look at Europe, Europe's 0.3, so 30 basis points. So there's still a lot of room if you look at other jurisdictions.

Unreal. So maybe let's step away from the macro level for a second and kind of what you were just talking about with credit cards, for individual, for each person. So obviously you've got a ton of experience in the industry, but also as a person who uses a credit card, do you have thoughts on things like credit card fees and how to choose the right credit card?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first thing I would say is there's two types of users. There's borrowers and then there's what we call in the business transactors, so the people who pay off their bill every month. If you're a transactor, you want to get the best reward card you can possibly get. Because if somebody is going to pay you back for doing business with them, why not take it? And then the piece of advice I have for transactors is don't pay annual fees. There's good products out there. I've heard some people say, "I earn it back. So I don't mind paying an annual fee because it pays for itself." You can do the math if you will, but if you look around, there's plenty of really good products out there that give you quite a bit back without an annual fee. I've personally never paid an annual fee on a credit card and will go to my grave avoiding it if I possibly can. If you're a borrower, if you're somebody who does revolve a balance on a credit card every now and then, it's all about the rate.

Go for the lowest rate possible. If you can be responsible, take advantage of some of those promotional rates they give you, but make sure that you're aware when the rate ends. Take advantage of it. There's a lot of really good, nearly free money out there for people to take advantage of if you're already in debt. Don't use the free money to go get yourself deeper in debt. That's a recipe for disaster because the rates will go up. But that's it. I mean, be very mindful of what it is that you're paying. And then more importantly, minimize what you borrow on a credit card. It is absolutely, it may not be the absolute last resort, but it's bloody close and you're going to pay an absolute fortune to borrow on a credit card. Even if you've got a good rate, it's very expensive. So try and avoid it if you can.

Right? So this month we are 10 years past the great financial crisis and you were a banking executive at the time.

Had a front row seat.

 

How do you look back on that? What's your thoughts? Have we learned our lessons?

Well, it's interesting because if you read the, Jamie Dimon, who is CEO of JP Morgan Chase, writes a great annual letter to his shareholders every year, which is, I think, required reading to anybody who is in financial services. And I think the year, I think it was either 2011, 2012, he wrote a letter and he talked about financial crisis as being something that happens every 10 years. And it was said only half in jest, because if you kind of go back through the history every 10 years, there is a financial slash bank crisis. I'm not talking about a recession. I'm talking about a crisis, whether it be lending too much to oil companies or to third world nations or what have you. So we forget and we make mistakes. And I would tell you that if you go to the US specifically, they learned a lot of lessons.

A lot of those lessons are starting to get forgotten. If you kind of go back and look at where banks are lending today, they were awfully strict in 2012, 2013, but we forget market share becomes an issue. Revenue growth becomes an issue. Next thing you know, they're back to lending to people that might be a little bit more dodgy. So I don't think we're going to repeat precisely the same way, but there's a very high likelihood that we'll see something.

Did you see it coming back then?

I did not see it. Well, I saw it in the credit card space, but that's not really a great indicator, but a lot of people who I knew who were in the space, like for example, investment bankers who were in the business of packaging credit, collateralized debt obligation, whatever, oh, they saw it coming. Absolutely, they saw it coming. And I remember one of them, who shall remain nameless, telling me, "We knew it was coming. We knew what we were doing. The challenge was, if you were the only one to pull back, you would be losing the income, losing the bonus, and everybody else would be eating your lunch. So you just kept going until the whole market blew up."

There was an inverted pyramid where it was not difficult to imagine a situation where a $200,000 mortgage, when you went through all the iterations and derivatives, could generate more than $200,000 in fees.

I mean, that's the amount of leverage that was out there. People were buying CDOs that were backed by derivatives on mortgages. So one $200,000 mortgage could back $1 million dollars or $10 million worth of derivatives.

 

We talked to Doug about the financial crisis a few weeks ago. And one of the things that I said was that I didn't think that there's a lot of malicious things going on and people generally were just acting in their own silos and it all came together to be at a huge crisis, but we were chatting before and you didn't agree with that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Maliciousness is something that's always hard to define. Let me answer it this way because I don't want to throw too many people under the bus, although I probably just did, a lot of people did things that they either knew or should have known were going to lead to bad outcomes.

There were a lot of consumers out there who were coaxed by brokers and mortgage brokers and what have you to fill in applications with incorrect information. They knew full well the information they were putting out there was incorrect, but they were being coached by professionals-

There were no checks and balances. Things were getting through the system where if you don't have any skin in the game, somebody was writing a mortgage, somebody was buying that mortgage off the broker and then flipping it into a fund that was going to be used to package a bunch of bonds in the marketplace. So the people who actually own the debt at the end of the day were the bond holders-

Who oftentimes had no idea what they were buying and the banks along the way were collecting fees. So if you're just collecting a fee for moving paper through the pipeline, why wouldn't you continue to write more and more of it? So people knew or should've known that this was going to end up in a bad place. And I've said this before to be inflammatory, I'm really surprised at the end of the day that through the financial crisis and all the aftermath that as far as I know, not a single banker ended up serving any jail time for their part in the crisis because to my eyes, some of the stuff that took place, if it was not kind of banking transactions would absolutely have landed somebody in jail.

 

So does this cause you to view risk differently, having gone through this and as you've now retired, how do you view risk in terms of your assets to provide your retirement income?

It's a great question. Do I view risk differently? Absolutely. 100%. It has scarred me and that scar will be with me forever. In terms of how I manage my life, I'm not risk averse. I mean, best way to be completely risk averse is to go bankrupt earlier or to run out of money early, but I'm cautious. And when it comes to investments, I don't take unnecessary risk. I choose to do a fair amount of diversification where I possibly can. I mean, a lot of it is through you guys and I'm patient. I'm a firm believer, as the data shows, if you just invest for the longterm and stay invested, eventually markets rebound and the financial crisis was a great example of that. And I think at the trough, it was down 40, 50% and it was back above water in a very short period of time. If you had pulled out and missed the uptick, you would've lost a pile of money. So I invest and stay invested and just try not to look at the daily numbers other than just for sheer interest purposes.

 

Do you have any final thoughts, Martin?

All I would say to people is if you're listening to this and you're trying to figure out how you get your own personal situation in order, as I said, job one, make sure you're controlling your expenses as best you possibly can. It's the one thing that is totally within your control that can have a meaningful impact on your retirement. And then has your guest said a few years ago, invest the money in getting good advice. At the end of the day, there's professionals that don't understand the market. So go find yourself a good professional that does understand the market and don't be afraid to pay for that advice. It will pay back in spades over time

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