Today's show is centred on the expected cost of pessimism and how investor expectations of loss negatively affect financial decisions. After concisely exploring the data and literature on the subject, we get into a few solutions to this dynamic and talk about how to find a way around natural human tendencies and myopic loss aversion. We then get into our first Mark's Minutes segment, with our colleague Mark McGrath briefly explaining some interesting ideas about risk and tax-free savings accounts. For today's episode retrospective, we go over Episode 45 and the conversation we had with Moira Somers about effective communication and advice methods. Matthew Dicks, the author of Storyworthy then joins us to offer some insight into the utility of stories in the different areas of life, including financial advice, and more relaxed social settings. Matthew does a great job of describing and demonstrating how stories connect people, and allow ideas to flow in a natural and impactful way, so make sure to tune in.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Introducing the inverse relationship between subjective return expectations and expected returns. (0:02:55)

• Potential solutions to this issue; checking investments less frequently, ignoring financial media, healthy advisor relationships, and more.  (0:15:39)

• Mark's Minutes: Mark McGrath shares some background on the TFSA and its positive and negative sides. (0:22:59)

• A quick recap of our episode with Moira Somers and its lessons on effective financial advice. (0:30:36)

• An introduction to Matthew Dicks and some thoughts on storytelling. (0:32:05)

• Matthew talks about the power of storytelling to shape the world. (0:36:35)

• Strategies for finding, crafting, and telling great stories. (0:41:45)

• Matthew weighs in using storytelling in the world of investing and financial advice. (0:48:23)

• Finding the value in your own personal data and experience. (0:52:04)

• Today's after-show: upcoming events and news from home. (0:54:40)

Read the Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, portfolio managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to episode 267. Incredibly 267. Today, Ben, you talk about the expected cost of pessimism. Super excited about that topic and what you will talk about. As people know from our last episode, Mark McGrath has joined our team, and today we're going to kick off a new segment which we are calling Mark's Minutes. Yes, it's quite creative, but we are open to feedback for topic ideas. Mark's going to join us every couple of weeks to break down another topic in financial planning.

We will also do a recap of an interview we had a couple of years ago with Dr. Moira Somers, who is a great friend of ours and our team. For this week's book review, once again, we've been lucky to get the author of a book to join us. We're going to talk about the book called Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling. This book was written by Matthew Dicks and Dan Kennedy. Matthew is going to join us today to talk about the importance of storytelling and, of course, the after-show for the three of us, so stick around.

Ben Felix: I do want to highlight before we get into the episode that we have an upcoming webinar. We've been mentioning these on the podcast, and to our surprise, and maybe it shouldn't be a surprise, I don't know. But to our surprise, a ton of people have heard us talk about the webinars on the podcast and then signed up for them, which is great. That's why we're doing them. I think they're more valuable to everybody if lots of people are attending, but Angelica mentioned to me, I think, last time we mentioned one of these on the podcast, 44 people signed up for the webinar. It shouldn't be a surprise given the number of listeners that we know we have, but it is just amazing to see. Anyway.

Cameron Passmore: Events are great. The events are great. The way they interact and use that tool to get interaction, they're very cool events. It’s not just a boring financial seminar.

Ben Felix: Yeah, no, no. They are cool. I've watched a few of them, because we're recording them and posting them on YouTube. I think the team is doing a really, really good job delivering them both with their actual delivery, but also with the software tools they're using. Like you said, Cameron, it's just a cool setup. The next one is September 6th. The topic for this one, which I think will probably be pretty popular, is how much do I need to retire? How much money do I need to have saved for retirement? Phil Briggs and Jordan Carter from our team here are going to be hosting that. That's September 6th. You can find the sign up. We'll put it in the show notes, but it's also on PWL social platforms.

Cameron Passmore: Yes, these events are happening every two weeks. To stay in the loop on what's going on, just follow us on Twitter or on LinkedIn. Everything's posted there.

Ben Felix: Cool. All right. That's the upcoming webinar. With that, I think we can go ahead to the episode.

***

Cameron Passmore: All right, Ben, let’s dive in. This is a pretty cool topic and I think people find it interesting. Kick it off.

Ben Felix: I think it's interesting, too. I started thinking about this. We mentioned this in our last episode, and I saw some people talking about the comments that I made about this online after actually I wrote this, what we're going to talk about today, but just suggested to me that it is a pretty interesting topic, which is the comments that I made last time that got me thinking about it were just this idea that there's an inverse relationship between people's subjective return expectations and expected returns. That's what got me thinking about this. What I've titled the topic is the expected cost of pessimism. I think that's pretty catchy. I don't know.

Cameron Passmore: It is when you think about it.

Ben Felix: Yeah, I think so. If worrying about the next market crash is affecting your investment decisions, you're not alone in that. I think that's something that worries a lot of people and affects the asset allocation decisions of a lot of people. What I'm going to argue is that you're making an expensive mistake by letting that worry affect your decisions. People spend so much time worrying about the next market downturn that they end up missing out on market returns, which tend to be positive in the long run. It makes me think of that famous Peter Lynch quote, “Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections that has been lost in the corrections themselves.”

Stocks have been this incredible wealth generating tool around the world for hundreds of years. I'll talk about some of the data behind that hundreds of years comment, which I think is also pretty cool. A lot of investors hold pessimistic beliefs about the stock market and people with more pessimistic beliefs, and there's data on this. There’s a paper on this that I'm referencing, two papers, actually. People with more pessimistic beliefs about the stock market invest less of their wealth in stocks, or just don't participate in stocks. The result is pessimistic investors leaving huge amounts of potential wealth on the table. That's my expected cost of pessimism idea.

Now, if we go back as far as we have data, which as people may remember from Will Goetzmann that we had on as a guest a while ago, we have data going back pretty far as far back as we do have data, the optimists, the people who have invested in stocks have triumphed. Of course, there's that famous book by Dimson, Marsh and Staunton, The Triumph of the Optimists that touches on that.

Now it is true that some individual stock markets have delivered total losses. That's Russia and China being prime examples in history. I'm sure there are others, if you go back far enough. Then some markets have just had really poor returns in the long run. Globally, global stock returns have been incredible for at least 123 years, which is where we have the really good quality Dimson, Marsh and Staunton data. We also have the Scott Cederburg data that goes back a little bit further. Then we have data for the Netherlands and the UK back to 1629. We have data back to 1372 for one French company. That's one of the ones that we talked to Will Goetzmann about. You take all that together, and it suggests a long-run real return of around 5% for stocks, which is also, I think, what Fama told us.

Cameron Passmore: Exactly what he said.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Around 5%. That number, that roughly 5% in real terms has been persistent for hundreds of years. 1372. Crazy. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying stocks are risk-free in the long run. They have been and will continue to be volatile in the short run. They're certainly not risk-free even in the long run. It's possible to lose money in real terms, even over a 30-year period. That's one of the things that we talked to Scott Cederburg about. Especially in a single country, the chances of losing over 30 years in a diversified portfolio are much lower than in a single country portfolio. Even still, there's a non-zero probability using Scott Cederburg's data.

Even when you account for failed markets and bad outcomes, long-term diversified investors who have remained disciplined have been typically rewarded quite nicely. That's the setup. That's the long-term evidence. That's the reason to be optimistic. Despite the long-term evidence, supporting stocks as being sensible long-term investments for most investors, investors worry about watching their investments fall in value day-to-day, even if those day-to-day drops won't affect their long-term plan. That's myopic loss aversion, which is a term people may have heard about. It's a problem for long-term investors.

There's actually research on this from John List, who we had on Rational Reminder a while ago. He found that people who check their investments more frequently invest less in risky assets and earn lower returns. Individual investors, part of the problem here is that individual investors tend to believe that the next major market crash is just around the corner. They're myopically loss averse. They think short term and worry about losses, even if they are long-term investors. They believe that the next major market crash, the next one-day crash on par with 1987, or 1929, investors subjective assessments of the probability of those events is about an order of magnitude larger than the actual historical frequency of those events. That's crazy.

Cameron Passmore: That's wild.

Ben Felix: Yeah. You combine that with myopic loss aversion, it's not a good setup. Pessimism is also influenced at least in part by the media, which has an asymmetric effect on crash beliefs. This is also fascinating. Articles with negative sentiment increase crash beliefs, while those with positive sentiment have no effect.

Cameron Passmore: Wow.

Ben Felix: Another important one is that bad stock market outcomes receive disproportionately pessimistic coverage in the media. Now the impact on investors, so pessimistic beliefs about market crashes, they do affect how people invest. Subjective crash probabilities are negatively associated with flows and equity mutual funds. The equity share of investors’ portfolios is influenced by their perception of rare disaster risk by the perception of some big, bad thing happening in the stock market that will affect them.

Now, market crashes are certainly painful. I don't want to minimize that. Remember, markets have delivered positive long-term returns despite many historical crashes. When crashes do happen, this is another important point about the pessimism stuff, when crashes do happen, investors’ expectations of stock market returns become more pessimistic, which I guess, you'd expect based on what we've covered so far. They become more pessimistic despite the evidence that falling stock prices usually indicate higher expected returns, rather than lower, and that the probability of a large positive return is higher following a crash. That's that inverse relationship between expected returns and subjective return expectations.

That's how we can generalize those comments is that investors, subjective expectations, if you ask someone what they think market returns are going to be in the next year, a few years or whatever, that number, that expectation is going to be inversely related to actual market expected returns. Expected returns go up, return expectations go down, which is pretty crazy. I think that point is incredibly important, because we see it. People get more risk averse than it has to be that way. Expected returns are high, because people have become more risk averse.

Cameron Passmore: It's usually wrapped up in something like, “Oh, I'll just sit out now. I don't mind missing some of the upside. I just want to preserve my capital. I'll buy back in later.”

Ben Felix: Which, hey, sure. That's one of the likely explanations for why investor returns trail fund returns. If you go and look at the returns of a fund and ask how the investors in that fund done, they typically underperformed by quite a bit, and increasingly so with increasingly volatile funds.

Cameron Passmore: If you think over your investing lifetime, it is very easy to not get what the market has to offer. It's very easy to get it if you stick with it, but there's a lot of chatter, media, friends, nervousness. I think as the dollars get larger, it gets more difficult to completely ignore all that.

Ben Felix: Definitely. People tend to revise their subjective return expectations. Their feelings about stock returns, about stock return expectations downward when market expected returns are high, which I think leads to an under-allocation to stocks arguably at the worst possible times. Now, the fact that expected returns seem to increase when stock prices fall, actually makes stocks a little bit less risky in the long run than they would be if they were completely random. That's that return predictability idea, where expected returns rise when markets are volatile that makes stocks a little bit less risky in the long run than if they were just totally random.

Now, another fascinating and important input here in thinking about this is that personal experiences also matter a lot to investors’ expectations about the future. Even though, again, when you step back and take a cold rational approach to this topic, personal experience should not have anything to do with an objective assessment of expected returns. In reality, people who have experienced low stock market returns throughout their lives are less willing to take risk. They allocate less of their wealth to stocks and they're more pessimistic about future stock returns.

Then we mentioned asymmetries in the way that the media affects people's expectations, but there's another one here where there are asymmetries in the way that people learn from new stock market information. The formation of beliefs when learning from losses tends to be overly pessimistic, overly sensitive to bad outcomes and further away from an objective assessment of expectations compared to the formation of beliefs when learning from gains. Their expectations are informed more intensely by losses than by gains.

Cameron Passmore: Wow.

Ben Felix: Personal experience with investing, it can even affect how much people save for retirement with those who have earned high risk adjusted returns increasing their savings rate more than people who have had a less rewarding experience. It can affect both the asset allocation channel, but also the savings channel. Now, makes sense when you think about it.

Cameron Passmore: You think that's the greed that’s kicking in? If you've had a good experience, you're saying, people will be more motivated to save more?

Ben Felix: Yeah, that was a paper from James Choi. Yeah, they found that people who earned higher risk adjusted returns increased their savings more. I don't know if I'd call it greed, but if you've put money into, I don't know what example to use, but an index, so maybe it's a China index, or a Russia index, or something, like an emerging markets index that's done poorly, if you put money into that, I don't know, 10 years ago, I don't know what the actual returns of those indexes are, but whatever. You take a losing index, you put money into it 10 years ago and it's been flat, or you've lost money, would you increase your savings rate? Probably not. But if you've made a bunch of money, I don't know if it's necessarily greed. It's just learning.

If you learn that this stock thing sucks, or maybe you're in a mutual fund with 3% fees, or something and you've been flat for 10 years, but it's been extremely volatile. You look at that, it's like, “Well, I'm not going to put more money into that.” Meanwhile, if you've made money, you learn that it's a positive experience. Just think about it. It makes sense. If you've lived through low returns, you'll be hesitant to keep saving and investing.

Cameron Passmore: In that investment. But you might come back and say, “Maybe there's a better way to do this.”

Ben Felix: Yeah. Do people do that, though? Do people step back and say like –

Cameron Passmore: People are messy. We say that all the time.

Ben Felix: They don't know. They don't know that there's been a 5% real return in stocks since 1372. Most people don't know that.

Cameron Passmore: No. That is absolutely true. That is absolutely true.

Ben Felix: Yeah. They don't take that step back and objectively assess their expected returns with data outside of their own personal experience. They just take their personal experience as the right way to form expectations. If we back up and take all that stuff together, I think people tend to be pessimistic in general. They worry about short-term returns, even if they themselves have long horizons. They're influenced by the financial media, which over-represents negative outcomes.

They overestimate the probability of an impending market crash. They become more pessimistic when expected returns are high. They condition their beliefs about the future on their own personal experiences. They update their beliefs more aggressively following losses than gains. That's a pretty rough setup, right, for investors. Now, those errors, if we can call them errors, I'll call them errors, lead investors to hold more conservative portfolios than a more optimistic investor would, or to avoid participating in the stock market altogether.

In either case, they're sabotaging their long-term returns with short-term decision-making, which is not ideal. That's the bad news, I guess. That's the effects that pessimism can have. I do have some potential solutions, or suggestions that I try to think through. Given these problems, what can people do to improve outcomes? I think an easy one, again, coming from John List, and we talked about this with him when he was on the podcast, is to look at your investments less frequently.

Cliff Asness always makes this joke about making an illiquid fund that you just can't see the returns of for whatever. Can't see the returns for 10 years. You can't actually do that, because regulators wouldn't let you, but individuals can choose to look at their investments less frequently. We know that people are myopically loss averse. We know empirically that seeing your investments less frequently is associated with earning higher returns and taking more equity risk. I think that automating, or delegating more of your portfolio management process to reduce how frequently you have to interact with your investments may be helpful.

An example there, investors lose less of their returns to in-opportune investment timing decisions in asset allocation funds. This is based on Morningstar's data, which rebalance automatically, than they do in, for example, equity funds. Even more so in sector funds. That's comparing the investor return to the investment return, that gap is smaller for asset allocation funds, which rebalance themselves. That data has its flaws, but my hunch though, there's enough of a trend between asset allocation funds, equity funds, and sector funds, which have a widening gap, progressively. But my hunch there is that it's at least partially related to rebalancing after equities drop being really difficult for a lot of people, whereas asset allocation funds are doing it themselves.

That's buying stocks when pessimism and expected returns are high and subjective return expectations are low. That's hard. Of course, it is. Now, automating your investment process is only helpful if you're investing in stocks to begin with, which a lot of people who are pessimistic about the stock market are just not. That's the problem of non-participation in stock markets. Financial literacy does seem to increase stock market participation, so I think watching, or listening to podcasts like this can be helpful.

Tuning out the financial media is another easy win. The media makes investors more pessimistic, and I'm going to make an extreme statement here. Without offering them any useful information. Now listen to this. There's a paper here in, I think, Journal of Finance, but it's one of the most widely cited papers that I had not heard about previously, like thousands. I got to find the number because when I saw this, I was taken aback. 2,439 citations. This is a big paper. I just hadn't come across it before. But the findings are incredible. These are my words and I'll use their findings to support it.

By the time the media is reporting on something, that thing is already reflected in prices. Media content does not contain new information about fundamental asset values. That's from the paper. Did you hear that?

Cameron Passmore: I should say, restate that. This is what they said. This is from the paper.

Ben Felix: Yeah, yeah. Media content does not contain new information about fundamental asset values.

Cameron Passmore: Self-advertising.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Self-advertising. Anyway, so you're not gaining anything from financial media, but you are getting more pessimistic, because people learn asymmetrically from the media and the media also disproportionately covers negative events, but you're gaining nothing from it. Cutting that out is a pretty easy win. But since many of the issues we've talked about are related to errors and base rates, like we talked about, well, why don't people just look for different investments? I said, because they don't know that expected returns are positive and that historical returns are positive, or they don't understand how expected returns change over time, I think those are all base rate issues. Getting an outside perspective might be useful.

Financial advisors do seem, and there's how many papers? Four papers that I have on this, I think. Financial advisors do seem to increase participation in the stock market and to boost the share of stocks in investors' portfolios. I think that makes sense to the extent that financial advisors' beliefs are more informed than their clients. There are, of course, issues with financial advisors, but on this specific topic of equity participation, they do seem to have a positive effect.

Trust enough financial advisor may also reduce the perceived riskiness of investments and allow risk-averse investor to earn higher expected returns with a financial advisor than they would on their own. I think that's a theoretical paper in the Journal of Finance called Money Doctors. This premise is basically that, that the prevalence of financial advisors may be explained by trust allowing investors to earn higher expected returns than they would on their own, because just due to that trust channel, empirically longer duration client relationships, which this paper used as a measure of trust, increase client's willingness to take risk with their investments.

Now, it's easy to say that people don't need financial advice, because everyone should just go and buy low-cost index funds in their discount brokerage account, which is something that I, of course, agree with theoretically, but a lot of people don't do that. That's an interesting solution to non-participation and to unnecessary low stock exposure. Now, while financial advisors may help to get people invested and to get the right amount of stock exposure, I think it is important to watch out for fees, high fees, and conflict of interest, which could easily – and I have actually seen papers showing in their sample that the fees basically offset the benefits of the financial advice.

I think it's also important to be wary of the fact that a lot of financial advisors make the same errors that a typical individual investor would. It's a bit of a minefield, but I think that on this issue of pessimism and non-participation and low-equity exposure, financial advisors can't help, but caution is warranted as usual whenever we talk about that topic.

To finish, pessimism is expensive, or it's expected to be expensive. It's got a high expected cost, which is basically the expected returns of equities. The stock market is this incredible tool for long-term wealth generation. But to benefit from that, you have to participate in it consistently, myopic loss aversion, overestimating the probability of crashes, having pessimistic subject of return expectations when expected returns are high, and conditioning expectations about the future on negative personal experiences can all lead to missing out on the returns that the market has to offer.

Looking at your investments less frequently, automating or delegating your investment process, increasing your financial literacy, getting an outside perspective, and potentially hiring a skilled financial advisor with a whole bunch of qualifiers with reasonable fees and limited conflicts of interest are all potential solutions to reducing the long-term costs of pessimism.

Cameron Passmore: Brilliant. That was awesome. Lots of references. I love when you take these references and roll it all up into a concise, important lesson.

Ben Felix: Yeah, I think there are 31 papers in there, which we’ll, of course, link in the show notes.

Cameron Passmore: 31 papers into 23 minutes of content. It's wild. That was fantastic.

Ben Felix: Awesome.

Cameron Passmore: Why don't you queue up Mark coming on next?

Ben Felix: I'll introduce Mark when we flip over to that segment, but this is going to be our first Mark's Minute with Mark McGrath. Let's go ahead to that segment.

[MARK’S MINUTE]

Ben Felix: Mark McGrath, welcome back to the Rational Reminder Podcast to kick off your new segment, which we are very tentatively calling Mark's Minutes. We are open to suggestions from the audience on what we should call this segment. Maybe they'll get a better feel for it once you've delivered this topic.

Mark McGrath: There you go. Maybe after a few episodes, we'll get some creative input from the audience.

Ben Felix: Let's go. Let's get right into it. Talk about what the topic is, and let's just go.

Mark McGrath: This is something I wrote about, or tweeted about recently. I have tweeted about it in the past, too. I know, Ben, you've got a video on this, actually, as well. I tweeted recently that you should be hesitant, or shouldn't take risky bets with your tax-free savings account, your TFSA. Incidentally, a couple of weeks later, I stumbled upon a post on Reddit on the Personal Finance Canada subreddit that exemplified the exact issue that I was talking about.

I think, first of all, I'll give a little bit of a preamble, or background on the TFSA, how it works, how the contribution works, some of the benefits of the TFSA, we’ll get into the problem, and then we'll talk specifically about this particular case.

For listeners who are not aware, the TFSA came to fruition in 2009. The way it works is you get a set amount of contribution room each year. Everybody who is of age, age of majority, gets the same amount of room, and it's based on, basically, from 2009 forward, if you were 18, at least 18-years-old, you qualified at that time. For 2023, the contribution room is $6,500. If you go back and you were 18, at least in 2009, your cumulative room as of this year would be $88,000. If you've never used a TFSA before, you can dump $88,000 into it today.

Now, there is another calculation that comes into place when looking at TFSA room. That is that any withdrawals that you made from a TFSA in previous years can be recontributed the following calendar year or later. Quick example, you open a TFSA today, you put in $10,000, you invest that money, it grows to, say, $12,000, you withdraw $12,000. The following year, your contribution room is going to be any room that you haven't used from the current year and previous years, plus the full amount of that withdrawal, so plus the full $12,000 in that scenario. That's how the contribution room is calculated.

The benefits of the TFSA, of course, are that any investment income, or investment growth that you earn in the TFSA is tax-free forever, whether you withdraw it from the TFSA, or leave it in there. If you've got a, just call it a globally diversified portfolio and it's spitting out interest in Canadian dividends, foreign dividends, some unrealized capital gains, none of that is taxable to you in three. Over long periods of time, the TFSA is an incredibly powerful tool when used appropriately.

Here comes the problem. People tend to focus on the upside returns that are possible with the TFSA, rightfully, so generally focus on the benefits of the TFSA. It's a two-sided coin. The issue is that when you lose money in your TFSA, if you make an investment in the TFSA and it drops in value, so take the same example, you invest $10,000, but it drops to $7,000 and doesn't recover, you're a bit hamstrung, because you've lost that $3,000 of contribution room. Now, even if you withdraw the $7,000, again, the following year, you can only recontribute what you withdrew from the TFSA. The following year, you only get back to $7,000 in room. You've permanently impaired your TFSA room when that happens.

I've even had accountants tell me, TFSAs are for trying to hit home runs in this type of thing, but rarely do you think about the downside implications of using the TFSA in that way. In this particular case, and this Reddit post, this investor was 31-years-old, and he had about $70,000 in his tax-free savings account. He put it all into one stock, and this was a pharmaceutical company, or a biotech company, I believe it was. It actually wasn't a penny stock at the time. I looked at the chart last night, and it's been listed since 2009. As recently, as 2018, it was trading at over $90 per share, Canadian.

On the surface, it didn't look like a super high-risk stock, or a penny stock, or anything like that. What this investor did is he continued to buy as the stock dropped. Now, I don't know exactly how much contribution room he used up. He just mentioned that he had $70,000 in his TFSA, so I don't know if he put in 15 and grew to 70, but I think that's besides the point, because the lesson still stands. He bought it all the way down. As of May of this year, the company was delisted from the NASDAQ. Basically, for all intents and purposes, it went to zero.

The outcome here is that not only has this investor lost $70,000, which obviously is not good, but he's also burned $70,000 worth of his tax-free savings account room that he can never recover. The stock is never going to recover. It was delisted. It's gone to zero effectively. He's now lost all of his contribution room, or at least the $70,000 that he had in room. 

Then lastly, of course, because it's a tax-free savings account and all of the investment income and growth is tax-free, when you have losses in your TFSA, you can't claim a capital loss for tax purposes. If this was in a non-registered investment account, which is just an account that's outside of a TFSA or an RSP, he would have had a $70,000 capital loss. If he did, he could have carried that loss back up to three years and refiled tax returns, or he could have carried it forward indefinitely to offset future gains.

It's a bit of a triple way of it. He's lost the money. He's burned the TFSA room, and he gets no tax benefit for the capital loss. If you think about it, that $70,000 just call it a 3% real rate of return, or something like that, you're looking at a $190,000 or $200,000 of value that he could have accumulated by just investing more rationally. That's it for today. That's why you don't make risky bets from your TFSA.

Ben Felix: I love it. I looked at this pretty recently, because I was actually thinking about – I saw that same Reddit post that you saw, and I was thinking about refreshing my video on this, because I did that one years ago. I sent it to you. What did you say to me? You mean this in a nice way, but my videos have gotten a lot better since. Yeah, my old videos were terrible.

Yeah, I was looking at numbers on this and the difference in after-tax growth, if you assume that you just invested in a diversified portfolio at a high tax rate, in a taxable account versus a TFSA, that long-term difference over 30 years is massive. You could have 2X the wealth by being in a TFSA and a tax-free savings account than by being in a taxable account. That cost of losing that room is really high. You're not getting the capital loss, which is terrible, but then not having that room as a long-term investor is real bad.

Mark McGrath: Huge opportunity cost.

Cameron Passmore: Your point is even more powerful, Mark, is someone has other assets outside of the TFSA, but someone only has a TFSA and they have a lottery-like personality. I guess, that's the only argument to go over something like this. But if you have a diversified portfolio outside, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Mark McGrath: In this case, the poster, the investor did say that this was virtually all of their savings. They've reset themselves, essentially.

Cameron Passmore: They rolled the dice and came up short.

Ben Felix: You've got to think that – so in the TFSA, you are taking more risk, because in the taxable account, the government sharing in some of your upside, but they're also sharing the downside. In the TFSA, you're just taking more risk. If you really, really want to take a lot of risk, the TFSA is, I guess, arguably a good place to do that. However, if you look at the statistics on individual stock picks, you're much more likely – it's like playing the lottery, literally. There's this massively skewed distribution. Anyway, I think it's such an important point. I'm glad you brought that to us, Mark. It's a good one.

Mark McGrath: Yeah, no worries. Thanks.

Cameron Passmore: That was a great kickoff to Mark's Minutes.

Mark McGrath: Again, open to suggestions on the title here.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, we don't progress to be branding experts here.

***

Cameron Passmore: Awesome to have Mark join us like that. it's going to be so great to have him on a regular basis, which is pretty cool. Such a good guy. Such a great addition to an already incredible team. Let's dive into another look back at a previous episode that we found interesting. I'm going to jump right into it this week with our good friend.

In episode 45, back in May of 2019, we welcome Dr. Moira Somers to the podcast. Moira is a psychologist, a family wealth consultant, and the author of the wonderful book, Advice That Sticks: How to give financial advice that people will follow. She's been a coach to our team for a long time and has helped many of our clients over the years. In our conversation with Dr. Somers, we discussed how well psychologists can help someone's situation. This help is as much for advisors, as it is for investors they are advising.

Advisors need to be as effective as they can be in helping people make financial decisions. Since all decisions have an emotional component to them, it's important to be as aware as possible of what the client’s motivation is and also the emotional state of what the advisor is in while the decisions are being made. That is the key takeaway, in my opinion, of that conversation.

We discussed what it takes to be a successful DIY investor and the value that a great advisor can bring when they bring their most aware self to helping clients. Make sure you listen to the end where Dr. Somers describes how money, time, and energy form an important trifecta in what we have to work with in our lives. That was episode 45 with Dr. Moira Somers.

Ben Felix: Very nice.

Cameron Passmore: She's fantastic. She's a fantastic person and a great friend of all of ours here. Great episode. Okay, let's jump into the book review this week as we've done recently, instead of doing an actual review. I don't think I've done a review in a long time, actually, without having a guest on recently, but maybe I'm just more tuned in, because I hear about it quite a bit. For example, on the Prof G Podcast, Scott Galloway is always talking about storytelling being one of the key skills he wants his two boys to develop through their education.

In an effort to learn more about storytelling and to develop my own skill out of it, I looked for a book that explains why story is important, what impact can they have, but also, how can you get better at practicing storytelling? Someone recommended the book Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling by Matthew Dicks. With a title like that, you can tell it's probably a pretty important topic. I know, Ben, you've got your own personal reservations are strong about storytelling, but I don't think you can debate the impact the storytelling can have on others.

Ben Felix: I don't have enough information to debate it. I just know that personally, when I'm reading a book that has a combination of data and stories, I find myself flipping past the stories to look for the data.

Cameron Passmore: What they're referring to in the book is these short stories. They're not talking about long – I agree with you. When reading books, that drives me nuts as well. This is using storytelling, just in communicating with others, be it at work, or at play. Anyways, Matthew Dicks is an elementary school teacher, columnist, and internationally best-selling author, including several novels, in addition to his non-fiction titles. He's a record 59-time Moth StorySLAM and nine-time grand slam champion who has performed for audiences around the world. These are much like stand-up comedy clubs, except it's people getting up and telling their stories.

They also have a podcast, which is fun to listen to. Some crazy stories. You can tell these people who are good at telling stories, are fascinating to listen to. He's also the founder and artistic director of Speak Up, which is a Hartford-based storytelling organization. He teaches public speaking, storytelling and marketing strategies to corporations, universities, politicians, advertising agency, the clergy, and many more.

In the book, he wrote, “Make it your mission to find, see, remember, and identify stories. You'll begin to see your life in a new and more compelling light.” I thought it'd be cool to have him on. He talks about having a daily practice of trying to find a story a day. He says, take a few minutes every morning and just try to find a story. I did that for, I don't know, a few weeks. I must confess, with vacation it fell off. But it's interesting to look for stories that have impact. It's often not something big that happened in the day. Conversation with a client for example, something will come out. They'll refer to something, this was a great story.

Ben Felix: Can you give me an example? Like you said, you're coming up with a story a day for a while. What kind of stories are we talking about?

Cameron Passmore: One example, I had launched with a long time very dear client earlier this summer, who had a knee replacement. I don't remember what's – I actually wrote the story out. Had I known you're going to ask me this, I would have been more prepared. I remember being aware of looking for a story. He talked about the relationship that we have had for probably, I don't know, 25-plus years of going for lunch every quarter or so. He says, “When I string that relationship through all these years together, I just have so much appreciation.” He says, “Remember that sketch we drew out? This has to be 20 years ago. What my financial plan was, where we'll have my pension from here, my savings from here, my Canada pension plan. My inheritance from my mother, my business assets. You drew my picture of my life.” He says, “I have that picture.” He didn't have it with me, so I've got that blaze in my brain. I said, “Well, we have it in our hard drive back at the office and I know exactly what you're talking about.”

He said, “That's been my guiding light for 25-plus years.” He says, “Combination of that along with our complete trust relationship.” I'm like, wow, this is something really interesting. I didn't work on it to hone to go and try to present it at a SLAM event, for example, but it's something where you notice it. I think this becomes an interesting story. I don't know what you do with it, but it's just a little thing that happens, that illustrates the trust we develop, how you might craft a financial plan for someone. Just the concept of the plan. It's been successful for him and he’s successfully retired.

Ben Felix: Interesting.

Cameron Passmore: Those are all over the place in your daily life. Anyway, so with that, let's welcome Matthew Dicks to the Rational Reminder Podcast and go to our conversation with Matthew.

Cameron Passmore: Matthew Dicks, welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.

Matthew Dicks: Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here.

Cameron Passmore: Well, it's great to have you. I loved your book, Storytelling. I thought it was just a wonderful book and tool to learn how to do storytelling.

Matthew Dicks: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Cameron Passmore:How important is storytelling?

Matthew Dicks: Steve Jobs said, storytellers are the ones who rule the world and I tend to agree with him. It's amazing how you can reshape reality to the way you need it to be if you know how to tell a good story. I think if you want to communicate with people, especially to be memorable and to be someone who people actually want to listen to, to be entertaining, I think so often, people have important and meaningful things to share, but they make no attempt to share those things in a way that capture the attention of an audience.

When you're a storyteller, you can say those important things and have people hear you and you can even say unimportant things that sound important, because you're able to tell them in an effective way. I think it's huge. I think it's so important.

Ben Felix: Can you talk with some of the contexts where storytelling is useful, like at work, or in your personal life?

Matthew Dicks: Well, just about everywhere. All I have to do is look at my client list. Just this week, just an hour ago, I was working with an attorney. An hour before that, I was working with a priest. I've been telling stories all my life to my children. It's the way I got my wife. If you ask her how she fell for me, I had hoped she would have said, “I took one look at you, but it turned out, that was not the case.” It was through storytelling that I managed to get my wife. I'm a terrible, terrible golfer and I play all the time, because people know that while we're looking for my ball somewhere in the trees, I'm going to entertain them with a good story.

Whether it's business, or whether it's personal, I work with scientists. That's really helpful. People who do important research, but don't understand how to communicate that research in a way that convinces people that what they're doing is worthy and important. I have yet to find a business, or an industry, or a person for whom storytelling can't help them significantly.

Ben Felix: Wow.

Cameron Passmore: What makes a great story?

Matthew Dicks: Well, you have to know what a story is. That's really the troublesome part for most people. Most people think of storytelling as something happened to me over the course of period of time. I'm going to tell you what that thing was. That's often reporting on your life, but not actually a story. The only people who want to hear you report on your life is your spouse, maybe, your mother, possibly, and that's about it. Nobody really wants to hear a report on what your day was like.

A story is about fundamentally change over time. It's either realization, which is the most common one. I used to think something and then some stuff happened. Now I think a new thing, or I see the world in a new way. Or sometimes transformation, which is I used to be one kind of a person and then some stuff happened to me. Now I'm a new kind of person. That's every movie you've seen, every book you've read. It should be every story that you tell. That isn't to say that you can't tell a funny anecdote. You can't tell someone the funny thing your kid said, or the thing you saw the other day. All of those are fine, but they don't qualify as stories. Meaning, people won't remember them. They're not going to convince people. They're not going to change their minds. They're not going to let you worm your way into their hearts and minds.

When you want to tell a story, it has to be over the course of a period of time, whether that's one minute, or a hundred years, I changed in some way and now I'm going to share that change with you.

Ben Felix: How big is a great story?

Matthew Dicks: Well, that doesn't have to be big at all. I am very famous for taking tiny little moments and making them into stories. I have a friend who says, “Matt can pick up a pebble and somehow he will turn that into a meaningful story that will make you laugh and cry by the time the pebble has ascended to his eye level.” Now, that's not true. That's an exaggeration.

I'm a person who got into storytelling originally, because I've had a bunch of big, ridiculous things happen to me. I've died twice and come back to life through CPR. I've been arrested and tried for a crime I didn't commit. I was homeless and in jail. All of those things. I quickly discovered as I was telling stories that those are not the most interesting stories to tell, because it's really hard for people to relate to jail and to homelessness and to your heart stopping beating and you stop breathing. All of those things are difficult to convey.

It's much easier for me to tell a story about a moment I have with my son, or a moment with a friend, or little tiny things. What I've become known for in the storytelling community is stories that where nothing basically happens and yet, so much happens over the course of the telling of the story. The mistake people make is they often think that stories are the action that's happening around us. When most of the time, most of the changes that occurr in us, they happen in an invisible way.

If you're watching me at the moment I suddenly see the world in a new way, I'm not going to have any physical manifestation of that moment. Most of the time, stories, those significant, meaningful moments, they happen in our heads and no one would ever know they're happening. The storyteller has to convey all of that emotion and all of that reality to the audience in a meaningful way. Stories can be infinitesimally small. Naturally, they can be big. I have told stories about the times I've died and come back to life. You can't avoid those. Those are little gems that are harder to tell, but when you tell them, well, they're great too. But you don't need much to tell a story.

Cameron Passmore: How do you find great stories?

Matthew Dicks: Well, I have a bunch of strategies. The one that I use the most is called homework for life. Yeah, I have a TED Talk on it. If someone wants to go into real, great detail, they can go just Google the phrase ‘homework for life’ and they can find it right away. Essentially, what I tell people is that we have stories in our everyday lives that we miss all the time. We ignore them. Or when we see them, we take note of them and then we throw them away like their trash.

The worst game I play with people is I say, take your age, whatever it is. I'm 52. Today, we can subtract 12, let's say. If you subtract 12 from your age, for me, it's 40, whatever your numbers are, think about that year of your life and tell me how many stories you can remember from that year of your life. Now, unless you moved, or changed jobs, got divorced, got married, had a kid, unless you had one of those big moments, a lot of times people can't tell me a single thing from a year that happened just 12 years ago.

I've actually had people cry in workshops when they realize, they've lost an entire year. It doesn't mean that nothing happened over the course of that year. It doesn't mean that they don't have a life filled with stories. It really just means they walked through life and left all of those stories behind. Homework for life is a process where every single day I basically reflect upon my day and look for the stories in that day that I might tell. Not every day contains a story, but more days contain stories than you might expect. Through the process of doing this every single day, sitting down and saying, “What is my story worthy moment?” I write it down in a very short way using Excel, just a tiny little bit. Just enough to hold on to the moment and the memory over the course of time.

It's not just me. Thousands and thousands of people around the world will report to you that over the course of time, if you do this, you'll start to see stories that you're not seeing right now, and you'll hold on to the ones that you're lucky enough to see. There's lots of ways to find stories, including mining your past. That's very useful, too. There's lots of strategies you can use to do that as well.

Just by paying attention to the everyday life you're living, in those moments where your heart lifts and sores, or falls, or you see the world differently, or someone says something to you that makes you think about yourself, or your job, or your spouse differently, all of those are the moments that we're trying to tell as storytellers.

Ben Felix: How do you craft a story that will connect with the audience?

Matthew Dicks: The joy is if you're telling a story about change over time, a meaningful and rich story, it's going to connect. The best example I have just happened to be on a plane yesterday. I was flying home from Washington to Connecticut across the country, and I decided to watch the movie A Few Good Men, which is a movie I've seen a million times. I had just been reading about it, and I said, “Well, I'll watch this and analyze it while I do some other things on the plane.”

As the movie ended, I found myself crying on the airplane. I had never cried over this movie, and most people, frankly, don't. There's not a lot to cry over. As I watched it this time, it's a movie about a guy named Daniel Caffey, and his father has passed away, and he's living his entire life trying to impress a father who is no longer on this earth. At the end, he wins the case, and he finally feels like he has done enough to earn his father's love, even though his father is no longer with us.

My father left me when I was seven and never really came back. Somehow, because that story, because Aaron Sorkin was smart enough to not just put a lawyer in the story, but to put a lawyer who is trying to overcome the loss of a father and find a way to live up to what his father expected of him. Because that was part of the story, it wasn't just a case, it wasn't just a courtroom drama, it was real characters who were overcoming change over time, it made me cry because it made me think of my father and how I can't win the respect of my father, because he never came home.

We tell stories that connect with people when we include character change over time, our own personal change. Because if I tell you that there was a day when I didn't understand my autistic daughter, and then there was a day when I finally understood her, you don't have to have an autistic daughter to understand. There was once a time in my life where I didn't understand someone and then I did understand someone.

When we're talking about human emotions and change and the general feelings that people have, the actual context of the moment is not as important, the reality of those moments, as long as we put in the humanity that goes along with it, which is what Aaron Sorkin did really cleverly there. That's why I found myself crying on a full airplane over somewhere over Nevada.

Ben Felix: Wow.

Cameron Passmore: What's the best way to tell a story?

Matthew Dicks: There's a lot of ways to do it. I always say that when I'm telling a story, what you have to understand is that you're in a conversation with your audience, which is to say you have to understand what your audience wants and needs. If I'm standing on a stage in front of a thousand people, what I know is that my audience has their complete attention upon me, which means, I can speak slowly and I can use pausing, and I can alter my volume and all of those things, because that's a performance situation. When I tell that story, that's what's expected.

I can tell that very same story though on a golf course with my buddies. I understand that they don't want to hear me speak for eight consecutive minutes, while they're playing golf. That would make them crazy. I have a choice then of either abbreviating the story, or more likely, I'll tell them a little bit of the story here. Then when we get to the green, I'll tell them seen to a whole later, I'll give them another scene from the story. I'll spread that story out over time.

What we have to think about is not what the story is, but what our audience wants from us while we're telling the story. The mistake story tellers make is they often tell a story in the way they want to tell it, meaning, they see the story as something that they own and they need to pass on to an audience. When really what it is is they have a story, but they have to find the right version of that story depending on the context they're inhabiting.

If I'm telling a story to my fifth graders, it's going to be entirely different than the story I might tell on a stage, versus a story I'll tell to my wife in the car. It's going to be the same story, but the version of it has to change. Meaning, the length, the pausing, the timing, all of those things, depending on what my audience wants. We have to really think about what does the audience want from the story, not what do I want from the story.

Ben Felix: Can we try something, Matt? If it doesn't work, we can cut this.

Matthew Dicks: Sure.

Ben Felix: This podcast is about sensible investing and financial decision-making. A big portion of that, something that we talk about often, is using low-cost index funds to invest in the financial markets. How would you use storytelling to get that message across to people, just as an example?

Matthew Dicks: Low-cost index funds, so basically, what you're telling people is let's not look for specific stocks. Let's invest in a conglomerate of stocks, and let's make sure we're not paying a lot for that. That's what we're essentially talking about?

Ben Felix: Perfect. Beautiful.

Matthew Dicks: I would be looking for a metaphor, where I could describe something like that. Maybe a good metaphor would be something like this. Actually, this is a true story. True stories are always better than any other story. My wife doesn't trust me to go to the grocery store and pick out fruits and vegetables. I've never picked an avocado to her satisfaction anytime in my entire life. Every avocado I pick is either overripe, or it will, for some reason, never be ripe. Every berry I pick is the wrong shape.

She once sent me to pick up a mango and I came home with a fruit that we couldn't identify until we put it on the internet and found out it was a papaya. I can't be trusted to go and purchase fruits and vegetables for myself and for my family. What we've done instead is we go to a farmer's market and we buy a basket full of fruit picked for us from the farmer. It's fruits and vegetables in a wooden basket that I bring home every week, which is guaranteed to make my wife and my family happy.

Like the stock investor who might go out into the world and say, “I'm going to pick this stock and this stock and this stock,” probably not a good idea, because unless you're willing to invest enormous amounts of time studying each one of those three companies, time that frankly you'll never have, why not instead invest in a basket, right? A basket that is chosen by experts, a farmer's market, which is a low-cost situation, bring that home and it's probably going to pay off in the long one. Now that is my first take.

What I did was essentially, I tried to create a metaphor. Meaning, I took what you had and I applied it to my own life and I simply asked myself, what's an example of a time in my life when I should not be picking out individual things, but instead should be trusting other people to pick those things for me? Did that work?

Ben Felix: That was incredible, that you just came up with that on the spot. Yes, that worked. That was great.

Matthew Dicks: Well, part of it is homework for life, honestly. Because I have those moments in my homework for life, those moments where I've screwed up the avocado a million times. Because I know it, because I'm noting it every day, I've got that story in my head. For me, this company is actually that I work with that they call me metaphor man, which is Matt, we have a platform on the internet that people use to communicate with other people, it's Slack. I work with Slack. They say, “We're adding a new feature to our platform and we need to come up with a metaphor for it. You're the one who comes up with our metaphors.”

Really, all it is is I'm just a storyteller who’s paying attention to his life. My metaphors that I offer them are really just my personal stories and we just take me out of the story and we still have the metaphor that can be used. You could take the story of my wife and the avocados and all of that out and you could just say, it's like going to a farmer's market. I think it's more interesting if you can actually say something that is personal and meaningful. I think that's even better. Even if you don't, just that metaphor probably works really well in the circumstance, too. I could probably do three more right now for you if you really wanted me to, and they would all probably work just as well.

Ben Felix: Yeah, that's very, very cool.

Cameron Passmore: This was my biggest takeaway from your book is that habit, the daily habit of looking for the story. As you pointed out in the book, you build a string of them through time that ends up becoming the story of your life. It becomes this fertile ground to go and look for metaphors in your daily life, because it's so full of these. It's not the, my son flipped on his bike and went to the ER. It's not these big dramatic moments necessarily. They're just all over the place, once you become tuned to this. I've been trying to build this habit.

Matthew Dicks: I work with data companies. I actually work with a company that does nothing but helps other companies monetize their data. The argument I make with all of these people I work with is the best data you have is the data that you're collecting every single day over the course of your life, the experiences you're having. Yet for some reason, business people are likely to throw that data away and seeing it is meaningless. Their most relevant, meaningful, everlasting source of data, which is themselves, they don't see that as important. Instead, they gather all of that other data and see that as the value.

I just say, don't throw away what you already have, because it's so easy to walk into a business situation, be asked a question. For me, respond with a story. When you respond with a story, you become memorable, you become entertaining, you're able to capture the room. So many people I work with say, “I'm at a conference and I can't get everyone to listen to me.” Through a few simple strategies, I teach them how to indicate to people that you're telling a story. As soon as you indicate that you're telling a story, it's like, the lights going down in a movie theater. Everyone shuts the hell up.

Unless, you actually have that story to tell, then you can't indicate that you're telling a story, because you have no content. You have no data. Start gathering your data. Then you'll be able to do what I just did, which is simply come up with a story, or a metaphor to apply to almost every circumstance.

Cameron Passmore: Incredible. It was so great to have you on, Matthew. Thanks so much for your contribution. It's incredible.

Matthew Dicks: I'm really glad. I hope it's helpful. I think the beauty of it is I just think that I trick people. What I do is I tell people I trick the business people I work with corporate America. I trick them into coming into their offices and teaching them how to tell stories for their business. But my secret goal is to get them to just learn how to tell stories for themselves. Because I think the first and most important audience for every story you ever tell is yourself. The quicker you become a personal storyteller of your own stories, the more likely you're going to be an effective storyteller for the business that you're doing. Don't discard that in any way. Tell personal stories in highly effective ways. Before you know it, you'll be up doing the same in the business that you're doing.

***

Ben Felix: All right, let's get into the after show for the three dedicated listeners that are remaining.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah. It was great to have Matthew on. I find that stuff so fascinating. No reviews lately, Ben.

Ben Felix: Yeah, that's a great point. We would love some more. I always like receiving them. It's always fun to read them, too. If you're listening and have not yet left a review for our podcast, we would appreciate it if you did so.

Cameron Passmore: Last call for our two upcoming meetups. If you're going to be at the Future Proof Conference in a couple of weeks in California, Angelica, Ben and I will be there. We'll also be hosting a breakfast on Monday morning. If you want to join us, email info@rationalreminder.ca. We actually have some listeners. We were going to host as Canadian advisors, but we said, “Ah, the more the merrier.” A bunch of different people coming out.

We'll also be recording a live episode on Tuesday morning at Future Proof from 9.55 to 9.40 on the social audio experiment stage. We'll be speaking with special guest and good friend of ours, Professor Hal Hershfield. It's going to be so cool.

Ben Felix: I think it'll be cool.

Cameron Passmore: It'd be super fun. I've also heard from a number of listeners who said that they'll be there, advisors that have reached out, Colin from Florida, Corey from Wisconsin and Emily from Charlotte will also be there. Then the week after that, we're in Toronto on September 21st. You and I will be at the CFA Society Toronto's 2023 Annual Wealth Conference. Going to be having an interesting conversation about some of the history of us and how we came together. That'll be fun as well. Live audience, live recording.

Ben Felix: Yeah. It's going to be interesting.

Cameron Passmore: It's called Lessons Learned from Five Years of the Rational Reminder Podcast. Then that night, so the night of the 21st of September, that's a Thursday night, we're hosting a meetup downtown Toronto at 5.00. Again, email info@rationalreminder.ca. I think we have 15 people going so far.

Ben Felix: Cool. Then I'm going to Edmonton after that. That's the 21st. The 22nd is Friday. I'm flying to Edmonton for the IAFP Conference, the Institute of Advanced Financial Planners. Braden from our team at PWL is speaking at that conference. I'm going to go and see him speak, but I'm not organizing a meetup, because I don't like organizing meetups. But I will be there, if anybody is in Edmonton and wants to hang out, happy to do that.

Cameron Passmore: Awesome. Yeah, I go from there to Salt Lake. I'm going to the Admired Leadership Conference, which will be super interesting, with Randall Stutman's company. People may have heard of him. He's been on with Ted Seides, as well as Shane Parrish. In the store, we're almost out of stock of Talking Sense cards. There's only 13 left. I think we've mentioned this before, but we're almost out of hoodies. The hoodie manufacturer’s not available anymore. Angelica is looking for a new hoodie supplier.

Ben Felix: Wow.

Cameron Passmore: If anyone has a good hoodie supplier of comfortably, yet affordable hoodies. There’s lots of nice hoodies, but they get pretty expensive. Today, Ben, it's the first day of us living in the condo while some renovations happen at home.

Ben Felix: Oh, wow.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, that's why I'm in the office today.

Ben Felix: Oh.

Cameron Passmore: We moved in yesterday. Today I'm here. We're doing some rentals at home. It's time. That means that all the furniture on the ground floor has got to go out and we got to go out. We're going to be living the condo life just outside of downtown Otto, which is going to be so much fun. I'm going to bike to work, work in the office. Lots of restaurants nearby.

Ben Felix: Okay, so you'll be recording from the office for a bit?

Cameron Passmore: Yeah.

Ben Felix: Okay.

Cameron Passmore: We're saying to Mark before we started recording that he's never seen my wall. He's never been in our office before. Got this hand painted mural here. Maybe I'll put a picture of the wall on the show notes in case people are interested.

Ben Felix: The wall is pretty cool.

Cameron Passmore: What's up with you lately? Anything exciting, other than getting excited for all your travel plans?

Ben Felix: Yeah. Well, I'm not doing that again. I'll tell you that right now. I’m going to take a year off of travelling. I'm going to go back to the COVID lifestyle in 2024. Nothing too crazy. I've been riding my bike a lot, which is great. I love living in a place that is easily accessible. I can ride out of my house and go on to the trails, which is just incredible.

Cameron Passmore: Where you live is incredible.

Ben Felix: That's been good. Nothing else too exciting. I've been trying to get the Common Sense Investing YouTube channel, or whatever. We're going to have to think of a new name for it. But my YouTube channel where I post solo videos, trying to revive that. I've got two recorded. One of them is on what we covered in the podcast today. Then another one actually on last week's Rational Reminder topic on holding cash. I've got another one coming on investing in the AI revolution. Anyway, trying to get rolling back with a regular cadence over there.

Cameron Passmore: Terrific. Speaking of incredible, we spent a couple days out west. Canmore is unbelievable. Had a chance to meet up with our colleague, Travis, and where he lives right by the Three Sisters Mountains. Wow, what a lifestyle. Hiking, biking, fishing, skiing, walking. I've been out west a number of times. For those who haven’t been to the Rockies, you got to go. Incredible. All right. You good to go, Ben?

Ben Felix: I'm good to go.

Cameron Passmore: All right. Thanks everybody for listening this week.

Is there an error in the transcript? Let us know! Email us at info@rationalreminder.ca.

Be sure to add the episode number for reference.

Participate in our Community Discussion about this Episode:

https://community.rationalreminder.ca/t/episode-237-the-expected-cost-of-pessimism-plus-matthew-dicks-on-the-value-of-storytelling-discussion-thread/24887

Join Our Live Event:

What Are my Options with my Options? - https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3916910040743/WN_PsbTZ8CqR_SvFNdpy5oIKA

Links From Today’s Episode:

Rational Reminder on iTunes — https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-podcast/id1426530582.
Rational Reminder on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/rationalreminder/

Rational Reminder on X — https://twitter.com/RationalRemind

Rational Reminder on YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/channel/

Rational Reminder Email — info@rationalreminder.ca
Benjamin Felix — https://www.pwlcapital.com/author/benjamin-felix/ 

Benjamin on X — https://twitter.com/benjaminwfelix

Benjamin on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminwfelix/

Cameron Passmore — https://www.pwlcapital.com/profile/cameron-passmore/

Cameron on X — https://twitter.com/CameronPassmore

Cameron on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronpassmore/

Matthew Dicks — https://matthewdicks.com/

Storyworthy — https://matthewdicks.com/storyworthy/

Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life Through the Power of Storytelling — https://www.amazon.com/Storyworthy-Engage-Persuade-through-Storytelling/dp/1608685489

Homework for Life TED — https://matthewdicks.com/homework-for-life/ 

Mark McGrath on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmcgrathcfp?originalSubdomain=ca

References

Anarkulova, A., Cederburg, S., & O’Doherty, M. S. (2021). The long-horizon returns of stocks, bonds, and bills: Evidence from a broad sample of developed markets. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3964908 1

Baeckström, Y., Marsh, I. W., & Silvester, J. (2021). Variations in investment advice provision: A study of financial advisors of millionaire investors. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 188, 716–735. Redirecting

Bender, S., Choi, J. J., Dyson, D., & Robertson, A. Z. (2022). Millionaires speak: What drives their personal investment decisions? Journal of Financial Economics, 146(1), 305–330. Redirecting

Chalmers, J., & Reuter, J. (2020). Is conflicted investment advice better than no advice? Journal of Financial Economics, 138(2), 366–387. Redirecting

Choi, J. J., Laibson, D., Madrian, B. C., & Metrick, A. (2009). Reinforcement learning and savings behavior. The Journal of Finance, 64(6), 2515–2534. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01509.x 1

Choi, J. J., & Robertson, A. Z. (2020). What matters to individual investors? Evidence from the horse’s mouth. The Journal of Finance, 75(4), 1965–2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12895

Cochrane, J. H. (2008). The dog that did not bark: A defense of return predictability. Review of Financial Studies, 21(4), 1533–1575. Dog That Did Not Bark: A Defense of Return Predictability | The Review of Financial Studies | Oxford Academic

Cochrane, J. H. (2011). Presidential address: Discount rates. The Journal of Finance, 66(4), 1047–1108. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2011.01671.x

Das, S., Kuhnen, C. M., & Nagel, S. (2020). Socioeconomic status and macroeconomic expectations. The Review of Financial Studies, 33(1), 395–432. Socioeconomic Status and Macroeconomic Expectations | The Review of Financial Studies | Oxford Academic

Dimson, E., Marsh, P., & Staunton, M. (2002). Triumph of the optimists: 101 years of global investment returns. Princeton University Press.

Egan, M., MacKay, A., & Yang, H. (2022). Recovering investor expectations from demand for index funds. The Review of Economic Studies, 89(5), 2559–2599. Recovering Investor Expectations from Demand for Index Funds | The Review of Economic Studies | Oxford Academic

Foerster, S., Linnainmaa, J. T., Melzer, B. T., & Previtero, A. (2017). Retail financial advice: Does one size fit all? : retail financial advice: does one size fit all. The Journal of Finance, 72(4), 1441–1482. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12514

García, D. (2013). Sentiment during recessions: Sentiment during recessions. The Journal of Finance, 68(3), 1267–1300. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12027

Gennaioli, N., Shleifer, A., & Vishny, R. (2015). Money doctors: Money doctors. The Journal of Finance, 70(1), 91–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12188

Georgarakos, D., & Inderst, R. (2011). Financial advice and stock market participation. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1641302

Goetzmann, W., Kim, D., & Shiller, R. (2016). Crash beliefs from investor surveys (w22143; p. w22143). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22143

Goetzmann, W. N., & Kim, D. (2018). Negative bubbles: What happens after a crash. European Financial Management, 24(2), 171–191. https://doi.org/10.1111/eufm.12164

Golez, B., & Koudijs, P. (2018). Four centuries of return predictability. Journal of Financial Economics, 127(2), 248–263. Redirecting 1

Greenwood, R., & Shleifer, A. (2014). Expectations of returns and expected returns. Review of Financial Studies, 27(3), 714–746. Expectations of Returns and Expected Returns | The Review of Financial Studies | Oxford Academic

Hoechle, D., Ruenzi, S., Schaub, N., & Schmid, M. (2018). Financial advice and bank profits. The Review of Financial Studies, 31(11), 4447–4492. Financial Advice and Bank Profits | The Review of Financial Studies | Oxford Academic

Hurd, M., Van Rooij, M., & Winter, J. (2011). Stock market expectations of Dutch households. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 26(3), 416–436. https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.1242

Kézdi, G., & Willis, R. (2011). Household stock market beliefs and learning (w17614; p. w17614). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w17614

Kuhnen, C. M. (2015). Asymmetric learning from financial information: Asymmetric learning from financial information. The Journal of Finance, 70(5), 2029–2062. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12223

Larson, F., List, J., & Metcalfe, R. (2016). Can myopic loss aversion explain the equity premium puzzle? Evidence from a natural field experiment with professional traders (w22605; p. w22605). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22605

Le Bris, D., Goetzmann, W. N., & Pouget, S. (2019). The present value relation over six centuries: The case of the Bazacle company. Journal of Financial Economics, 132(1), 248–265. Redirecting 1

Linnainmaa, J., Melzer, B., Previtero, A., & Foerster, Stephen. (2019). Financial Advisors and Risk-Taking. Working Paper. https://www.aleprevitero.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/029_Previtero_WP_FinancialAdviceRiskTaking.pdf

Linnainmaa, J., Melzer, B., Previtero, A., & Foerster, Stephen. (2022). Investor Protections and Stock Market Participation: An Evaluation of Financial Advisor Oversight. Working Paper. https://www.hec.ca/finance/Fichier/Previtero2022.pdf

Linnainmaa, J. T., Melzer, B. T., & Previtero, A. (2021). The misguided beliefs of financial advisors. The Journal of Finance, 76(2), 587–621. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12995

Malmendier, U., & Nagel, S. (2011). Depression babies: Do macroeconomic experiences affect risk taking? *. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(1), 373–416. Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk Taking?* | The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Oxford Academic

Tetlock, P. C. (2007). Giving content to investor sentiment: The role of media in the stock market. The Journal of Finance, 62(3), 1139–1168. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2007.01232.x

Van Rooij, M., Lusardi, A., & Alessie, R. (2011). Financial literacy and stock market participation. Journal of Financial Economics, 101(2), 449–472. Redirecting