Guest User

June 4, 2026

Ben Carlson: Investing at All-Time Highs | #412

Guest User

June 4, 2026

Ben Carlson works at Ritholtz Wealth Management, co-host Animal Spirits, write the blog A Wealth of Common Sense and the new book Risk & Reward.

Embed Block

Enter a valid embed URL or code.

In this episode, we are joined by Ben Carlson, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of Risk & Reward, for a wide-ranging conversation about market history, investor psychology, and the realities of long-term investing. Ben brings his trademark blend of data-driven thinking and plainspoken storytelling to topics like market crashes, inflation, diversification, and why investors are so tempted to time the market.

We explore the lessons from Japan’s historic asset bubble, the lingering impact of the Great Depression, and why diversification remains one of the few true free lunches in investing. Ben also explains the difference between volatility and risk, why the stock market is not the economy, and how investor behavior—not market performance—is often the biggest determinant of success. Along the way, we discuss inflation hedges, lost decades, speculative behavior, and the psychological challenge of staying invested through inevitable downturns.

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:00:20) Introducing Ben Carlson, his new book Risk & Reward, and his long-running blog A Wealth of Common Sense.

(0:03:16) Why investors shouldn’t panic about investing at all-time highs.

(0:03:58) The Japanese bubble and crash as one of history’s biggest market anomalies.

(0:05:39) Why Japan’s long-term returns look very different when viewed over 50 years.

(0:06:27) Lessons from the Great Depression and the worst stock market crash in U.S. history.

(0:07:43) Why the best long-term returns often follow the worst crashes.

(0:08:53) The role of diversification and self-awareness in managing portfolio risk.

(0:09:55) Defining investment success by achieving personal goals—not beating benchmarks.

(0:10:42) Why inflation feels so painful psychologically for investors and households.

(0:11:42) Ben’s three favorite long-term inflation hedges: human capital, housing, and stocks.

(0:13:47) Why market timing is psychologically seductive—and so difficult to execute successfully.

(0:15:00) Why handling losses is the single most important skill in investing.

(0:16:13) How devastating the economic side of the Great Depression really was.

(0:18:49) What policymakers learned from the Great Depression and 2008.

(0:20:39) The difference between recessionary and non-recessionary bear markets.

(0:21:52) Why the biggest up days and down days tend to cluster together in bear markets.

(0:23:18) Preparing for inevitable bear markets with a durable long-term plan.

(0:25:07) Why the stock market and the economy can diverge dramatically.

(0:28:10) The difference between volatility and risk—and why risk is often personal.

(0:29:37) Why comparing the stock market to a casino is fundamentally wrong.

(0:31:55) How modern investing platforms encourage speculative behavior.

(0:33:18) How extreme Japan’s 1980s asset bubble became before collapsing.

(0:35:43) The most important diversification lessons from Japan’s lost decades.

(0:37:39) How common “lost decades” actually are in stock market history.

(0:40:58) Three dimensions of diversification: geography, asset class, and strategy.

(0:41:53) Why there is no perfect portfolio—only the right portfolio for you.

(0:42:52) Common ways investors lose money in markets.

(0:44:03) Why investors should be skeptical of billionaire market predictions.

(0:45:57) Ben’s evolving definition of success and raising good, kind children.

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're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer and Dan Bortolotti, Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital.

Dan Bortolotti: Welcome to episode 412. We got a good interview on this episode.

Ben Felix: Yeah, it's honestly kind of surprising that this is the first time that we've had Ben Carlson on this podcast. We've kind of been creating content in parallel for years.

I've read lots of his blog posts. We've had Barry and Josh, Barry Ritholtz and Josh Brown on the podcast. It was great.

Oh, and Nick Maggiulli, twice. Those are all guys that are at Ben's firm, Ritholtz. Ben writes A Wealth of Common Sense blog.

He's also got a book of the same name. He's got a new book out, which is what we talked to him about roughly. I mean, it's more like the conversation was guided by what's in the book.

We didn't really talk about the book, but well, indirectly. The book is called Risk and Reward. It's just out from Harriman House.

It was a nice read. Ben spoke about the content very well, as he always does. Ben Carlson, for people who do not know, is the Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management.

He's been managing institutional portfolios for his entire career. He's also got a very popular blog that I mentioned the name of. He is the author of four books on saving, investing and money.

What do you think of the conversation?

Dan Bortolotti: Yeah. I think Ben is really one of a small number of financial writers out there who really – I mean, he backs up what he says with the data and the evidence, but he writes with a very distinctly non-academic style. He's very down to earth, very much common sense, very much practical, long-term wisdom.

I think that really comes across in the conversation. I think people are going to enjoy it.

Ben Felix: A very good writer. Similar to you, Dan, honestly.

You and Ben both have blogged. You read it and it's like, this is some really good writing.

Dan Bortolotti: Well, I appreciate that. I think that's kind of what I've always strived to do as well. It's like, yeah, of course you need to back up what you say, but I learned pretty early on in this game that if you really want to influence people and help them improve the way they invest, you can't just hammer them over the head with data.

People will push back against it if it conflicts with whatever their existing beliefs are. You need to share some insights and you need to bring it down to the level of their own personal lives. Some writers are really good at that.

Morgan Housel is another guy who's just maybe the best at it. As we'll see here, Ben has got a lot to contribute to that discussion.

Ben Felix: We talked a lot about long-term returns, risk. Well, as the title of the book suggests, risk and reward. Talked about the Japan bubble and crash, the 1929 crash, the difference between volatility and risk, the stock market versus the economy.

Ben has great thoughts on all this stuff and how that factors into asset allocation and the behavior of investors and just long-term thinking more generally. I thought it was a really nice conversation.

Dan Bortolotti: It was. Should we get to it?

Ben Felix: Let's go to our conversation with Ben Carlson. Ben Carlson, welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.

Ben Carlson: Thanks for asking. Glad to be here.

Ben Felix: Glad to have you here. Ben, how worried should people be about investing at all-time highs?

Ben Carlson: They should be freaking out right now. No. The funny thing is that I think some investors think the next all-time high is going to be THE HIGH, all capital letters.

More people maybe thought that after the Great Financial Crisis. This is it. One of these highs is the next one.

Data actually shows if you pick any day outside of all-time highs, which only happen 7% of all trading days or something, most of the time you're looking up at them, your returns are actually better going out one year, three years, five years from all-time highs, which makes sense when you consider that bull markets last longer than people think. One of them is going to be the peak. It's going to happen, but it's just one.

Most of them are just fine.

Dan Bortolotti: Ben, one of the questions that you always seem to get or many people get when they talk about the long-term potential for stocks is, what about Japan? Tell us a little bit about the Japanese counter example.

Ben Carlson: Probably one of my favorite chapters to write in the book. There aren't that many books written about the Japan situation, which is one of the biggest market outliers and anomalies in history. People always throw that in my face anytime I talk about long-term investing.

What about Japan, idiot? I get that all the time. People love throwing that down my face.

Funny, I actually told my publisher, can I call this book, Now Show Japan? They're like, that's a little too tongue-in-cheek. I think that's a little too inside baseball.

All right, fine. Maybe if we do the Japanese version, I want to call it Now Show Japan. It was perhaps the biggest bubble of all time.

It wasn't just stocks. Stocks traded 100 times earnings. It was real estate too.

The Imperial Grounds in Tokyo in 1989 were technically worth more than the entire Canadian real estate market combined. It was one of the most insane periods in history. They compressed all these returns in a short period of time.

The next three decades, if you would have invested right in 1989 at the top, you were underwater. And that's the thing people throw in your face. How can you be a long-term investor if a situation like this exists?

To me, I don't think that showing exceptions to the rule necessarily invalidates the rules. I think you have to understand those situations and help guide your actions a little bit like outliers do exist. But I don't think you can say that a situation like that totally invalidates.

Because guess what? The rest of the world did just fine after Japan peaked. Japan was pulling up the rest of the world in the 80s.

If you look at any of the returns, foreign stocks did much better than US stocks, mainly because of Japan. But the rest of the world, if you would have diversified, did just fine after Japan. And actually the long-term returns in Japan are much better than they think.

You just have to go back further.

Ben Felix: People miss that point. The bubble required really high returns before it popped. And so if you had been investing before the peak, you actually did okay because the returns were so high.

Ben Carlson: It's just a really long mean reversion. You got like 22% per year from 1970 to 1989 in Japan. Small caps in Japan did 30% per year for two decades.

It's insane. The returns almost had to be poor after that. If you put them together, the boom with the bust, it's like almost 9% per year.

It's kind of crazy. Over 50 years, the long-term worked. It's just that over that 20 or 30-year period, it didn't work so well.

Because yeah, the Nikkei didn't get a new high until like 2024 after peaking 1989. It's crazy.

Ben Felix: Yeah, it is crazy. Other than Japan, what have been the worst market crashes in history?

Ben Carlson: The Great Depression is the one that I always keep coming back to. I read Andrew Ross Sorkin's book, 1929. It's a fascinating period of time for me.

So the US stock market crashed like 86%. I can't imagine that happening today. And one of the reasons that society didn't just completely fall apart, it felt like it kind of did, I guess, no one really invested in the stock market back then.

That was one of the surprising things to me in my research is that it was like 1% or 2% of US households had any money in the stock market. It was more the economy that really took people down and 20%, 25% unemployment rate, the economy going nowhere, and Fed officials and government officials making it worse. So a lot of people have asked me like, do you think that could happen again?

Never want to say never when it comes to the markets. But I have a hard time thinking that we could allow the US stock market to fall 80%, 90% these days just because so many more people are involved in the markets now. Government officials just have more institutional knowledge about how to step in and save these things and act as the lender of last resort than they did back then.

The Fed was still pretty new when the Great Depression happened. They didn't have all the power they have today. That one is really scary.

The numbers are just insane. There are still records from back then in terms of down months and down days and down years that just will probably never be seen again.

Dan Bortolotti: So tell us about what happened after the 29 crash. And then more broadly, what tends to happen after market crashes like that?

Ben Carlson: It's funny. One of my favorite stats in the book is I look at historical rolling monthly 30-year returns on the S&P 500. And the worst 30-year return came if you invested at the peak in September of 1929, which actually was better than you would think.

It was like a total return of 850% and annual returns of almost 8% per year. So that's the worst 30-year return in the last 100 years or so. And then what happened afterwards after you had that huge crash and stocks fell 85% or whatever, then you had the best 30-year return.

And it was, I don't know, 15% or 16% per year. And so you went from worst to best in like three years. And I looked at some of the numbers too.

What if we just took the Great Depression completely out of the US stock market history? The stock market has given investors roughly 10% per year for 100 years. Let's just take that situation out and start it a few years later.

I think the returns go to like 11% or something. That's a lot for compounding-wise, but it's not like it completely changed the ballgame considerably considering it was such a huge, huge crash. The thing that happens after the crash is that your returns improve.

The expected returns are higher after you go through the crash. And that was obviously the biggest one ever for US stocks, at least.

Ben Felix: We talked about Japan crashing, Great Depression 1929 crash. What are the best ways to manage the risks of a stock portfolio?

Ben Carlson: I love the mindset that there really are no free lunches when it comes to investing. There's always something that you're going to be angry about or that's not going to work. But I think diversification is about as close as you can get to a period like that.

Actually, US bonds did pretty well, did okay during the Great Depression. So if you had some sort of liquidity or you probably did okay, didn't have all your money riding on the stock market like many people did who were investing at the time. The other form of risk management is understanding yourself.

What's going to leave you worse off? What is your blind spot? Do you overreact to these crashes?

Do you need some more conservative investments? Or are you a person who like, I just need to be aggressive at all times and I'll take what comes in terms of volatility and the ups and downs? That's a big form of risk management.

Really, it's just understanding what's the lesser version of yourself that's going to cause you the most pain.

Dan Bortolotti: So in the broader picture, how would you say that you think people can win at investing other than of course, picking stocks and timing the market perfectly?

Ben Carlson: Yeah, that's easy. I do think most people outside of finance, the biggest thing for them is like, are you just on track to achieve your goals? Jason Zweig at the Wall Street Journal did this story a number of years ago where he went to Florida.

He interviewed all these people in this beautiful golf course resort in Boca Raton or something. And he was asking them like, how did you do it? How did you retire down here?

What did you invest in? He asked one guy like, did your portfolio outperform the S&P 500? And the guy thought about it for a second and he said, I don't care.

What does it matter? I ended up in Boca. That's the point.

There are no like points for degree of difficulty or style points when it comes to investing. I think it's just like, how do you reach your goal and minimize risk along the way to achieve whatever your goals are? I think that's the biggest thing for most people.

That's the benchmark that matters.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I like that answer. How problematic is inflation for long-term investors?

Ben Carlson: Well, I think on the psyche of investors, what we've learned this decade is that it's very problematic. My favorite thing to study about markets is behavior and psychology and how people react to these things. Having read all these books about psychology, I totally underestimated how angry inflation would make people.

The fact that it came roaring back for the first time. Maybe it's just because we haven't had it in so long. I think the sentiment part of it is really interesting to watch how people react.

And even if your wages rise, it doesn't matter. The wages, that's me. That's my hard work.

But inflation, that's like someone else. That's a government or corporations or whoever. But I think the big thing for investors with inflation is just, it shows you, this is why you have to invest your money.

Because your dollar is getting eaten away by rising prices over time. You can complain about it and bury your money in the backyard, but good luck with that. You have to invest it in something if you want to try to keep up with or beat the rate of inflation.

Dan Bortolotti: People have lots of ideas of what kinds of assets they should purchase as hedges against inflation. What do you feel are the best ways for most households to do that?

Ben Carlson: I looked at this through more of a personal finance angle in the book. Because I think you can look at what is the best hedge against inflation in the short term, and it might change. Sometimes it's gold.

Maybe it's gonna be Bitcoin at some point. It didn't happen this time. I want to own energy stocks or some sort of precious metals or commodities.

And I'm sure those are all pretty decent answers. If you wanted to hedge inflation in the short term. The other side of that is, if you hold those assets, maybe when there's not inflation, they don't do as well.

So you have to be open to that. So I look at it as more from a personal finance perspective. And I say the three best inflation hedges are just a good job where you can increase your wages over time, which is I think one of the areas a lot of personal finance people don't spend enough time talking about.

Because it's hard to give people a blanket advice about how to increase your income. It's easier to tell people how to save and pay down debt. I talked about in the book, the two biggest spending categories for people are housing and transportation.

In the US that makes up, according to the BLS, something like 50% of household budgets. So I think if you don't have those two spending areas of your life taken care of in some way, and have a good handle on those, it's really hard to get ahead and save. If you overspend on your house, and if you overspend on your transportation, it's going to be hard to save in other areas.

And then finally, I think the stock market is still the best long-term inflation hedge. So over the past 100 years, it's like 6% to 7% over the rate of inflation. Over the short term, sometimes the stock market might falter against inflation.

That's what happened in 2022. But leading up to that inflationary period, the stock market did way better than inflation. I think you have to look at it not as short term.

And I don't think about inflation hedging as much as how am I going to hedge it over the next 12 months if it spikes, or the next 24 or 36 months, whatever it is. I look at it more like a long-term game. How do you keep up with changes in prices and your standard of living over the long term? Not just hedge it over the short term.

Ben Felix: I like the human capital answer a lot. You also mentioned in the book fixed rate mortgages. We don't really have those in Canada.

Not the same kind of long-term fixed rate mortgages that you guys have in the US, but just a paid-for home. Similar-ish outcome in terms of hedging your housing costs.

Ben Carlson: Yeah. And actually, housing itself is a pretty decent hedge against inflation, owning a home, because the materials go up, the cost of the land goes up, all these things.

Ben Felix: Why is timing the market so tempting for people?

Ben Carlson: It sounds great to just say, I got out at the top, or I got in at the bottom. It feels so good. I interacted with a few of these people in the 2008 crisis.

And the funny thing is, they might have timed the top pretty close, plus or minus a few months, and then the bear market kept going on, and the whole time they felt so good about themselves. And then the problem with market timing is you have to be right twice. And a lot of them just overstayed their welcome and couldn't get back in.

And the thing is, I had a colleague who did this. She sold in September of 2008, when Lehman Brothers was blowing up, and the stock market fell another 30% from there. So even as those banks were blowing up and all this bad stuff was happening, she didn't get back in.

And then when she did get back in, she tried to time the market four more times after that and was wrong every time. So sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is you're right about the timing once. It just adds so much psychological warfare to the investing game of trying to think, well, when should I buy back in?

Should I wait for the market to crash? What if the market gets away from me? There's so much uncertainty that it introduces, and it just makes it so much more psychologically challenging.

If you don't have some sort of rules or guidelines to guide your actions there, I just think you're setting yourself up for disappointment.

Dan Bortolotti: And what would you say is the single most important concept in investing?

Ben Carlson: I think it's how you deal with losses. Daniel Kahneman did a bunch of research on this, and he found the idea that losses sting twice as bad as gains feel good. He didn't even need to do the research because I explained this to my children.

We're all Michigan fans in my house. It's great when the team wins in football or basketball or whatever. But when they lose, my kids are distraught.

I tell them, just so you know, the loss always hurts more. You feel more. So it's kind of an intuitive feeling.

That's why there tends to be more volatility in bear markets or market downtrends. There's these wide swings. You have these huge up days and huge down days.

Where in bull markets, it's more like a smaller stair-step approach. And that's because when people lose money, they tend to panic. It just brings all these different feelings.

I talk about in the book how they've done studies where they show that people who lose money and their finances can relive those feelings and thoughts in their dreams. You have nightmares about losing money. It's something that can have a visceral impact on your body.

Dealing with losses is the most important thing as an investor because it's going to play head games with you.

Ben Felix: We talked earlier about the 1929 market crash. You said it was an 85% drop, which is crazy, but not that many people actually invested. Can you talk more about how bad the economic side was?

Ben Carlson: That, I think, was probably even worse for people. It wasn't just that it was a really nasty recession. Unemployment rate got to 20-25%, but it lasted a really long time.

Basically, the entire 30s. By 1937, the unemployment rate was still 20%. It wasn't really until World War II that things improved.

GDP in the Great Depression contracted 30%. Corporate profits fell by 70%, which is just unfathomable to think about. You talked a little about fixed-rate mortgages.

One of the reasons fixed-rate mortgages became a thing, that wasn't a thing before the Great Depression. I think something like 40% or 50% of all US households defaulted on their loans. They're saying, we can't let this many people lose their houses, so we have to extend the life of their mortgage.

The fact that there is a long-term fixed-rate mortgage in the US is an artifact of history from the Great Depression. All of these things, the production in the economy didn't hit those same levels in 1929 until World War II. It's funny because after the Great Depression, there's this whole generation of people, they call them generation, Great Depression babies, who were frugal and didn't spend money.

They reigned everything in. I think some baby boomers still have that mindset because it was their parents who lived through it. It's funny to think through how the pandemic was the opposite of that.

In the pandemic, we all turned into degenerate gamblers and speculators. Everyone wanted to invest. It was the complete opposite.

It is funny how these big events can shape generations of people.

Ben Felix: Yeah, there's a paper on that looking at how risk-taking changes for people who were born during the Great Depression. There's a great book on that period that I think I found through your blog years ago, Great Depression: A Diary by Benjamin Roth, such an interesting read.

Ben Carlson: I really enjoy reading market history, but sometimes it's cool to read people who were actually there. It's a little easier to have a steady hand when you think about it decades later, but if you were living through it, yeah, he shared his grandfather's diary. He made these comments like, man, I think the worst of it's over.

Then a year later, he'd be like, no, the worst was not over. It kept getting even worse. Yes, I love those accounts like that that are first person.

You look back at something like that on a chart and you go, eh, it would've been fine. I would've held through it or I would've bought at the bottom. The point that he makes in that book is it would've been a great buying opportunity for the stock market and no one had any money left.

It was impossible for people to buy the dip because the dips had all been bought and it just kept going down.

Dan Bortolotti: What are the main lessons from that crash? Because it certainly isn't, hold on, it'll be a difficult but short way down and then the recovery is just on the horizon. What do you take away from a crash that led to a decade-long depression?

Ben Carlson: It shows that there are outlier events that can happen and you have to account for that. That's not your baseline, of course. You see those charts that show like, oh, it looks just like 1929 again.

That's a little ridiculous, but you have to be willing to accept that there are outlier events that can happen. The extremes can go way further than you think. I also think policymakers have learned a lot of lessons from that.

The 2008 crisis with the government throwing so much money at it and lowering interest rates, I think they did that fast enough. A lot of people said because Fed Chair Ben Bernanke studied the Great Depression. He's like, we're not going to let that happen again.

We are going to be the lender of last resort. I don't think we get the response from governments around the globe in COVID if they didn't live through 2008 and see that actually throwing money at the problem can help the economy. I think policymakers learn their lessons.

It's funny though, because I talk about in the book, there's this concept called "normal accidents." This guy, Charles Perrow, studied all these nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors and ships and stuff like when things go wrong. His whole point is when you have these complex systems like this, you can try to make them safer in some ways you can, but it just shifts the risks elsewhere.

We've probably cut that left tail of the Great Depression off. What does that mean? Does it mean, I don't know, did people require higher returns in stocks back then because you could have that situation or are we setting ourselves up for complacency and other bigger risks down the line?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I think risk doesn't always just completely magically disappear. It just goes somewhere else.

Ben Felix: You definitely see the argument just looking at historical US stock market valuations that US stock market is just safer now and stock prices are higher, expected returns are lower.

Ben Carlson: Yeah, you're right. The valuations probably had to be lower back then to get people to invest because they didn't want to as much. You look at the long-term chart after the Great Depression, you're like, I'm not going to buy this.

Look at how much pain there is in there.

Ben Felix: Can you talk about how recessionary and non-recessionary bear markets tend to differ?

Ben Carlson: Yeah, I talked about the two different types of bear markets in the book. It's interesting that 2022 period was a non-recessionary bear market to a T. Those periods tend to be the magnitude of the fall is not as great.

It's like an average, like a 25% fall down in bear markets that happen outside of recession. During recession, it's like 40% or so downturn. Those recessionary ones last a lot longer.

But I think it is also instructive to know that there's a decent number of bear markets that occurred outside of a recession, where there's another reason where the stock market fell, whether it's investors freaking out or earnings, and sometimes it's right, sometimes it's wrong. But it's not like those situations just happen when there's a recession. We haven't had a real recession in the US really since the Great Financial Crisis.

There's been a handful of bear markets. And I think it's just important to recognize that the stock market can fall even if the economy is still growing and doing okay.

Dan Bortolotti: We touched on this a little bit already, but one of the interesting things in a bear market is that you can often have some of the best single days of market returns in the middle of what is a longer term downturn. There's still a lot of volatility on both up and down directions. So can you talk a little bit just about how volatility changes during bear markets?

Ben Carlson: Yeah, it's interesting because you see those studies that say like, hey, if you just miss the 25 worst days in the market, you would have done this. And if you just missed the 25 best days, it would actually have been this. The funny thing is that those best and worst days happen together.

It's during the bear market. You can see in March 2020, which is one of those volatile years since the Great Depression, there were these big eight or 9% down days when the pandemic hit. But then there's also these huge eight or 9% up days.

And that's the difference is that the volatility tends to cluster during those bear markets because people panic to the upside and the downside. It's like, oh yes, it's over. Let's everyone back in.

And you see these huge gains. And then it's like, no, we're taking away all that sunny attitude and we're taking it away. And then we're going to go back down.

And you see because, like I said, people panic. Those volatility clusters, that's what makes it so hard to understand what's going on in a bear market. Because sometimes you get these dead cat bounces.

It sucks you back in. Sometimes, no, that's the end of it. And we're off to the races.

That's why it's so hard to know when the bottom is in when a bear market does bottom. Everyone we've had this decade, someone has said, there's no way that was the bottom. We're going to roll over again.

There's no way COVID has to be worse because it's not improving. Inflation still hasn't improved. There's no way that's the bottom.

The thing is just like no one knows at the time. It's hard to know for sure. Is this just a dead cat bounce and volatility or is this the market actually, no, it's reversing course and it's going to go right back up.

Ben Felix: We talked about the challenges with timing the market. How should people prepare for these inevitable bear markets?

Ben Carlson: I think you have to have a durable enough plan to survive a wide range of environments. I think people have learned that this decade too. There's different investments that work differently under different economic circumstances, high inflation, low inflation, high growth, low growth.

A lot of people now are like, well, we're not going to have any more nasty recession or nasty bear markets. They all just are V-shaped bottoms. That's kind of hopeful thinking that you're not going to have one of these more extended periods because we haven't, again, we haven't had a recession.

So I think the way that I tell people is only hold enough stocks that you can hold during a bull market and a bear market. Don't try to go overboard during a bull market and then pull back during a bear market. That's like the exact opposite.

That's like selling high and buying low. So I think you have to be comfortable with your portfolio because money can evaporate pretty quickly in the stock market in terms of bad days and bad months. And market cycles are speeding up so much now because of the information age.

I actually am of the opinion that the downturns are going to be swifter. When they happen, it's just, we're just going to rip the band-aid off and go. I don't know if that's for sure.

That's kind of my line of thinking. You can lose money very fast. And if you're too aggressive and not prepared for it, it can be scary.

So I think for a lot of people, especially a lot of it depends on where you are in your investment life cycle. If you're a retiree and you have no human capital left, you're not going to be saving anymore. You don't have time to wait out bear markets as much.

And you don't want to sell your stocks in the down. So you need some sort of margin of safety, some sort of liquid, more conservative investments. You're not selling stocks when they've already fallen.

Part of it is understanding that, where are you in your life cycle? If you're young and you're accumulating assets, you shouldn't be scared of bear markets. They're a good opportunity for you.

You should want them to happen so you can buy it at lower prices.

Dan Bortolotti: I think a lot of people intuitively think that the stock market and the economy are intrinsically linked. And of course they are in some ways, but can you talk a little bit about how investors really need to understand the relationship between the stock market and the economy itself?

Ben Carlson: It's interesting because sometimes the stock market really is the economy and sometimes it's not. If you think about it, the US stock market is roughly 40% made of tech stocks. I guess, depending on how you define them, it could be 50%.

50% of the US economy is not made up of technology sector. 70% of the economy is driven by consumer spending. And a lot of that is on services, not even goods.

The stock market economy can diverge because the best companies and the biggest, best companies in the S&P 500, aren't really representative of the US economy. Small businesses and these types of things. So they can diverge at times.

I guess my biggest lesson when studying the economy... And it's funny because it's never been easier to track the economy. That kind of data we have now at our fingertips is better than anyone could have possibly wanted.

One of the biggest differences between now in the Great Depression, we talked about that period, people didn't know what the "economy," quote-unquote was back then. They didn't really measure even GDP. That didn't happen until World War II.

And so the fact that we have all this data at our fingertips, we have so much more information and data about the economy, people still can't predict what's going to happen with it. There's people way smarter than me that are in terms of macro pundits and forecasters. And they're wrong all the time.

Even with the ability to slice and dice this data, the hard part about the economy is the stock market, the data is there immediately. The economy operates on a lag. And the data is changed over time.

And it's hard. These multi-trillion dollar economies, they're kind of like turning a battleship. Whereas stock markets are more like speedboats.

And the battleship turns very slowly. The economy doesn't start and stop on a dime typically. That's what makes it much harder to wrap your head around.

That the stock market overreacts way quicker and faster than the economy. Because it's hard for the economy itself to have an overreaction.

Ben Felix: Yeah, the stock market is just forward-looking. The economy's economic data are backward-looking. And so the stock market cares about future expectations, which can change in directions different from economic data.

Ben Carlson: Yeah. And back to our thing about the two bear markets, they said the old quote is, "the stock market has predicted nine out of the last five recessions." Sometimes the forward-looking part of the stock market is right.

Sometimes it's wrong, but it's not going to stop to ask questions. It's going to go.

Ben Felix: As you mentioned in the book, your post on that, which has been read a million times, I think you wrote, fantastic. I made a video related to that after reading your post. It's a great topic.

And I do like in the book how you talk about how it's not that the stock market is not the economy. As you just said, sometimes it is, but they're just less related than I think people tend to think.

Ben Carlson: Yes. People have their own personal economy. No one's personal household inflation rate is what the government is putting out there.

And it makes people really angry. You think the inflation rate is 3%? Are you kidding me?

Have you seen how much it costs for daycare or housing? That's because everyone has their own personal economy and personal... And so I think sometimes what people do is they conflate anecdotes and their own personal life with the economy as a whole and the greater economy.

And that gets people into trouble because the US economy is like $32 trillion or something. It's huge. It's very dynamic.

It's very diverse. So your little inputs into it, your household is not representative of it at all, probably. And that's hard for people to wrap their head around.

Ben Felix: How do you describe the difference between volatility and risk?

Ben Carlson: Wall Street loves to quantify risk and put a number on it. I learned that early on in my career, like, oh, everything has to be a number. There has to be a risk or a probability or something.

It has to be verified. And I think for most people, risk is qualitative. It's harder to wrap your head around and put a data or a number on it.

That's the hard part for people because a lot of it does come down to the emotions. The risk profile is determined by your willingness, need and ability to take risk. I think need and ability, you can quantify a little bit.

What's the expected return on need to reach my goals? And my ability to take risk is like, where am I sitting right now? What's my net worth?

What am I saving? How much do I make? That stuff you can quantify.

The qualitative side is the willingness to take risk. So some people have the ability. Some people have a lot of money.

You could have a seven-figure portfolio and have the ability to take a lot of risk. But you might say, I don't want to because I already won the game. And so that squishy part, the willingness, that's the hard part.

That is really hard to verify and put a calculation or a formula on. And for a lot of people, there is no one. It comes down to really knowing yourself and that can be hard to do.

Ben Felix: Like you mentioned earlier, stocks are volatile, but they've been one of the best inflation hedges, if we can call it that, in the long run because they've got high enough expected returns.

Ben Carlson: Right.

Dan Bortolotti: A lot of skeptics of investing will compare the stock market to a casino. Can you tell us why you think that's a bad analogy?

Ben Carlson: Yes. My least favorite analogy of the stock market. I'll accept rollercoaster because it is kind of a rollercoaster sometimes.

But the casino... I'm a blackjack player. Don't know about you guys...

I grew up in Northern Michigan. We had a lot of the reservation casinos. So I could go in.

I was like 18. I loved it. Me and my friends would go on Friday nights.

We'd play blackjack. And the longer we sat at the table, the worse our odds were because the house has the odds in their favor. So the longer you sit at the table, from a probability perspective, the higher your odds of walking out of there as a loser.

It's the opposite with the stock market. The odds show that over a one-day period... It's almost a coin flip.

It's kind of funny. It's like 53% or 54% of all trading days in the U.S. stock market are positive. So the other 46% or so are negative.

Then you extend your time horizon. And since 1950, it's like 80% of all one-year periods are positive, 98% of all seven-year periods. So the longer you stay in the stock market casino, the better your odds of walking away a winner.

In my mind, that makes it the best casino in the world. It's the opposite of a real casino. The hard part is, for most people, is having enough patience to allow it to happen.

Ben Felix: Such a simple but powerful explanation. It's just a casino has negative expected returns. The longer you play, the more likely you are to lose, whereas the stock market's the opposite.

Positive expected return, you stay in your seat, you'll win. In the short term, though, they could look pretty similar.

Ben Carlson: Yeah. Today's day and age and the information, it's probably harder than ever for people to just sit on their hands and not do anything. You guys know, when you become a financial advisor, the first thing they tell you to tell clients is ignore the noise.

It's really great advice. It's a great platitude. And it's impossible to do these days because we have these little pieces of glass in our pockets that are constantly alerting us to everything that's going on in the world.

You can follow your investments immediately everywhere you go. I wrote about the 1987 crash once. And a guy wrote in and he said, you didn't live through this.

I don't know. I was six years old or something. He said, you didn't live through this.

But when I lived through the 1987 crash, I didn't know what happened until I was on my way home from work. I listened to it on the radio. And I thought we were going into depression.

And the next day I had to wait to call my broker to ask what my portfolio did. I think it was so much easier to be naive in the past and not pay attention to stuff. And today it's impossible.

So I think it's more important than ever to have a filter on your information. Have some limitations because if you have no limitations on like your information sources or your investments, it'll make your head spin. And it's really tempting to just take it all in and drink from a fire hose.

Ben Felix: Another issue is that a lot of the stuff that does get promoted to retail investors is more casino-like. A lot of the brokers will push options trading or meme stocks or whatever onto retail investors. And those probably do have a negative expected return in a lot of cases.

Ben Carlson: Well, unfortunately, I think we've learned this decade. I talked about the outcomes of the pandemic. We've learned that people really like to speculate.

The stat I gave in my book, and this one blows me away every time. Each year, Americans spend more money on the lottery than they do on sporting events, books, video games, movies, and music combined.

Ben Felix: It's crazy.

Ben Carlson: The retail investor has just shown more that they want to speculate and gamble. And I think, to be fair, a lot of people are doing it with part of their portfolio. They have target date funds or index funds in their retirement accounts, and they're leaving those alone.

They have their brokerage account and are speculating with that. If that's the case, that's not ideal, obviously. But I think if doing one allows you to leave the other one alone and you size it correctly, it's not the worst thing in the world, but it's just a gateway to more and more speculation.

And sometimes the worst thing that can happen is one of those lottery tickets pays off, and you go, oh, I'm pretty good at this. I'm going to do it again. As we all know, the probability of that happening consistently is very low, and that's the hard part.

Ben Felix: It's hard to size your bets appropriately when you're winning like that.

Ben Carlson: Yes.

Ben Felix: We talked about Japan earlier. Can you talk more about how severe was that bubble in terms of asset prices leading up to the 1990 crash?

Ben Carlson: I looked at the valuations of this, and I tried to match them up with the dot-com bubble. So the dot-com bubble is by far the biggest valuation bubble we've ever seen in the U.S. stock market. It dwarfs the 1929 crash even.

And I think the U.S. stock market traded like 45 times earnings. Japan at the peak was more like 100. It blew it out of the water.

It's funny because in Japan, their culture, they don't have the culture of risk-taking people. They're more conservative by nature. And they haven't really had any bubble-like behavior since then.

In the U.S., the joke is like, I don't know, every seven years or so, we need a bubble. Just scratch an itch. What else are we going to do?

Let's have a bubble and something. In Japan, it doesn't really happen that much. So I think the stock market in Japan, as a percentage of GDP, went from 30% in 1980 to 150% by 1989.

The run-up was really insane. It went from 15% of the global stock market to all the way up to 45% at the peak. And it was bigger than the U.S. stock market for a little bit there. And all the magazine covers at the time were talking about how Japan is taking over the U.S. as the dominant economic power. It didn't happen, obviously. It just goes to show you that anyone can get caught up in something like that.

That's a conservative culture of people that doesn't do this kind of thing. And they got caught up in it and they suspended their disbelief and just allowed themselves to dream. What if this is just this new paradigm and Japan's taking over the world?

Dan Bortolotti: How bad are Japan's long-term returns? Because you touched on it earlier. You said if you extend the period out before and after the bubble burst, maybe they normalize over some stretch of time?

Ben Carlson: Yeah. You just have to go really long-term mean reversion. And I wanted to finally put the Naoto Japan thing to rest.

So I looked at it. It's like 1% or 2% per year since 1990 for Japanese stocks, which is obviously terrible. That's really buy and hold.

But it was 22% and change from 1970 to 1989. So if you just mash those two together, you get 8.7% annual returns over the past 55 years or whatever. So actually the long-term, it bears out to many of the other stock markets, not that much worse.

The returns were so compressed in such a short period of time that afterwards, they had to be terrible. That's the problem. It was extreme mean reversion.

Ben Felix: As you've noted, people love using that as a counter example. But what do you think of the main lessons? I think people throw that out as like, well, stocks are risky or you shouldn't invest right now because of Japan.

What do you think of the actual useful takeaways from what happened in Japan for investors?

Ben Carlson: Their housing prices on an inflation adjusted basis are still below where they were in 1989 as well. Huge financial asset bubble that burst. It wasn't like there was bread lines in Japan.

I think if that happened in the US, there'd probably be anarchy. People would freak out. But Japan, they said, all right, fine, I guess we're dealing with this.

They had money in bonds, they increased their savings rates, and they took care of their elderly. They didn't have huge layoffs. The Japanese economy is still doing okay.

Those stocks in the last 10 or 15 years have come back nicely and are doing better. My biggest lesson from Japan is just the diversification piece. The rest of the world didn't slow down just because Japan peaked in 1989.

The US went on to have one of the best decades ever in the 1990s right afterwards. So Japan didn't bring the rest of the world down. The rest of the world went on and had a nice run in the 90s after that.

I think if you look at the country's stock markets, though, the ranking by decade is always changing. I have some of the numbers in the book on that. I just think if you have all of your money in a single country, you do potentially open yourselves up to outsized risks like that.

It's an unnecessary risk in my mind if you're going to put all of your eggs in one basket because you have the ability to diversify so much easier these days.

Ben Felix: The other one that I always find fascinating with Japan is that if you look at the market, it had that horrible period where it's still barely recovered now. Let's come back a bit. But if you look at Japanese value stocks or small cap value stocks over that same period, they actually did fine.

Ben Carlson: It's like strategy diversification as well. International stocks, the same thing. I haven't done very well with this bull market for the US, but actually, yeah, you're right.

Value stocks internationally have done a lot better than value stocks in the US. That form of diversification can save you in a lot of ways.

Dan Bortolotti: Speaking of one country dominating or lagging over one period, the US experienced its most difficult decade, at least in our remembrances, from the dot-com crash until about 2009, 2010. How common is it for there to be a true lost decade in the US market?

Ben Carlson: That period is kind of like singed into my memory because that's when I first came up in the industry. I saw it firsthand right from 2000, 2009. The S&P 500 went nowhere and it lost like 10% of its value.

I think it was like 1% per year. So the US has had technically three of them. The 1930s was a lost decade.

The 70s was a lost decade on a real basis. Nominally, the returns did okay, but inflation was so high on a real basis, you lost money. Then that first decade of the 21st century.

So three times in the past 100 years, probably more than most investors would think. But it's happened to a lot of asset classes. I was looking at energy stocks the other day.

Energy stocks basically went through a lost decade in the 2010s. They've boomed this decade, and they boomed a decade before. Gold had an amazing 1970s period, but then basically went nowhere in the 1980s and the 1990s.

And then it boomed again, another lost decade, and then another boom this decade. And so I think that's just the thing that a lot of people forget. When things are going well, people tend to think like, oh, nothing can ever stop this train.

And when things are going poorly, it's like, oh, this is never going to turn around. But all of these things are cyclical and nothing works forever. I think that's the point.

And when the U.S. did go through this lost decade, all these other asset classes did okay. Foreign stocks did better. Emerging markets and REITs and bonds and small cap value and all these different other strategies did pretty well when the U.S. went through the lost decade. And it was just the S&P 500, you know? So again, another feather in the cap of diversification.

Ben Felix: That seems like a particularly important lesson right now where the S&P 500 or the U.S. market has just been ripping. Valuations are high. And as you said, it doesn't usually go on forever.

Ben Carlson: And I've been hearing for years now, like, why would I invest in anything else? And obviously, a lot of those people weren't around or don't remember that. We did have a lost decade not that long ago.

Obviously, there's other reasons, but this is kind of the mean reversion from that. We had that really bad period. Now we're in a really good period.

The bad periods tend to follow the good periods and vice versa.

Dan Bortolotti: The lesson I always like to bring up to people is I was sort of similar. When I started, my blog was 2010. So that was right at the end of that so-called lost decade.

And we had the opposite because that decade was actually pretty good for Canadian stocks, much, much better than the U.S. And I got the same questions from readers except the opposite, which was, why would I invest in anything other than Canadian stocks? U.S. stocks, how did they do for you the last decade? Everybody's completely forgotten that now.

So it's just a kind of reminder of why you need to hold everything all the time. Because if it feels like you've got a portfolio that's going to have all the winners, you're probably poorly diversified.

Ben Carlson: And the hard part is these cycles aren't on a set schedule and they can last longer than you think. There's no way coming out of the great financial crisis, anyone would have predicted the U.S. stock market would be this strong for this long. We're going on like 17 years of like a booming bull market.

No one thought that was possible back then. That's the hard part. Sometimes these cycles, the pendulum swings really far.

You might be rebalancing into the pain for a number of years, which the way I look at it is, if you've been rebalancing back into these other areas, it's a form of like dollar cost averaging. And the international stocks have turned around the last couple of years. The emerging markets have turned around.

If you've been kind of rebalancing into the pain throughout this whole period, you were kind of set up and ready for that to happen.

Ben Felix: You mentioned a bunch of other asset classes and their relative performance during lost decades. Can you talk more about what has been historically the best way to avoid getting clobbered by a lost decade in a single stock market?

Ben Carlson: There's three different ways you can diversify. So one of them is geographically. We talked about investing outside of Japan.

Two is asset class. So it could be stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, other alternative investments. And then the other one is just strategy.

And you kind of mentioned them too. There's plenty of other different ways you can invest in the stock market that's outside of the S&P 500. There's small caps and mid caps and value stocks and high quality and dividends.

And there's more ways than ever to invest and diversify these days. And I think that's a great thing. And if you look at valuations today, sure the S&P looks pretty rich based on its history, but a lot of these other areas, they don't.

They look relatively cheap. So if you're really worried about the concentration and the AI hyperscalers and all their valuations, there's plenty of other places to invest these days, even in the stock market that don't have valuations anywhere near those companies.

Dan Bortolotti: When you try to combine asset classes, strategies, et cetera, is there a perfect portfolio? Is there an optimal mix of these things?

Ben Carlson: Yes. But I just have to tell you about it after the fact. It's funny.

The first guy I worked for had the Efficient Frontier that he would use to create bill portfolios for our clients. And he would always have to give them the spiel about, we're using the historical data here. If I had the future data, I wouldn't have to diversify.

I'd just give you the best asset. And I think that's the idea behind it is that you don't know what it's going to be. You just have to pick the portfolios perfect for you.

And for most people, perfect is the enemy of good. And you have to find something that you can just stick with. Diversifying doesn't always make it easier because you're always apologizing about something.

But I think it does take those tail risks off the table. And so you give up on the home runs, but you also can take away the strikeouts. And that's the point.

It's just getting something that you're personally comfortable with and then not worrying as much about what everyone else is doing, which is easier said than done.

Ben Felix: Yeah. And something that helps you meet your goals. I love the Boca example that you gave earlier.

I think from Jason Zweig. What are your, from the book, top 10 ways to lose money in the stock market?

Ben Carlson: There are a lot of different ways that you can be successful as an investor. I used to be of the mindset when I first started blogging that like, okay, there's one way everyone should follow. It's one way of doing things.

My way is the best way. But then I met with so many other investors that have been successful doing other things. People have been successful investing in individual stocks.

People have invested in index funds. People are real estate investors and technical analysts. There's tons of different ways to be successful.

I tend to think that the unsuccessful are all pretty common though. I think anyone who pretends that they're smarter than the market is due for pain. It's funny because many people think if they're smart in one area of life, that it's going to translate automatically to markets and it rarely ever does.

I've still yet to meet anyone who consistently timed the market. Things like chasing performance. And one of them that I really learned after the 2008 crisis was fighting the last war of like, okay, that big risk just happened.

How do we prepare for that one next time? And the next risk is rarely like the last risk. I think stuff like that is really tough.

I think anyone who panics during a downturn and changes their whole investment philosophy because they're living through bad times, I think that's a good way to lose some money.

Dan Bortolotti: Speaking of lists, we're going to ask you to itemize all of your top 20 beliefs about investing, but maybe we'll just say, share with us a couple of the highlights.

Ben Carlson: One of them that I've been harping on for a while is just kind of ignoring the billionaires out there who are giving you advice about what to do and saying, I'm going short the market or I predict a recession or the biggest thing. What we tell our wealth management clients all the time is we can't offer you investment advice unless we get to know you better. We have to know what your goals are.

We have to know your circumstances. When you're trying to take investment advice from people who are on financial television, you have to watch what they do and not what they say anyway. They create projections, but their portfolio doesn't match it.

Then you have to realize is what this person is saying really relevant to me anyway? Do they know my circumstances and my goals? How much I'm saving?

How much I'm investing? What my risk profile is? Of course, the answer is no.

But you hear one of these really smart people talk and you go, oh man, really? They're worried about a recession? They think the stock market is too overvalued.

I should probably listen to them. I also think the one big belief I have is that you don't always have to be bullish or bearish as an investor. If you're a hedge fund manager, sure.

I'm bullish right now in this company. I'm bullish on this area of the market or the market overall. I'm bearish.

But I think as an individual investor, it's funny with our clients, most of the time, it's not the market that dictates a portfolio change. It's their personal circumstances. They had a life event.

They make more money. They make less money. They got fired from the job.

They got an inheritance. They're going to get married. Someone in the family died.

It's usually a life event that constitutes like, okay, actually, your plan needs to change versus, oh, we're thinking about the market valuations. Now we're going to change your portfolio. The idea of being bullish or bearish,

I think it's different. And that's why shameless plug here for the name of the book, Risk & Reward. When we think about making changes to client portfolios, it's usually not us trying to make a prediction of what's going to happen in the market.

It's like the risk reward setup has changed in some way. We're not being paid enough risk to continue to invest in this asset class or this fund or something. And we need to make a change in the portfolio in terms of allocation or whatever.

I think that makes more sense than saying, I'm wildly bullish. It's time to go all in right now because no one knows how to time that stuff.

Ben Felix: We approach it the same way. And I would even go as far as saying that is the right way to think about it to the extent that things can be right and wrong in investing. All right, Ben, our last question for you. How do you define success in your life?

Ben Carlson: It's funny how much that has changed over the years for me. I think now where I am in my life, I have three kids. I think if they can be successful, good, kind people, that's success for me.

One of the benefits I think of having kids is that I don't worry about myself as much anymore or think about myself and take myself too seriously because all the worry goes on them. As long as my wife and I can help make them good people, good, kind people, I think that's success in my life.

Ben Felix: That's a great answer. How old are your kids?

Ben Carlson: My oldest daughter just turned 12 and we have twins that are nine years old.

Ben Felix: Okay, nice. I've got kids of similar ages and then two more.

Ben Carlson: I've reached the age where they no longer think I'm the greatest person in the world. They no longer think I'm cool. I'm the dad that gets ripped on now.

And I don't know how it happened, but that's what I've graduated into. So I'm no longer the cool dad. I'm the dad that gets ripped on.

Ben Felix: That's pretty funny.

Ben Carlson: It's tough.

Ben Felix: Older two rip on me, my two younger daughters, they still think I'm pretty cool, but my two boys, they rip on me every moment they get.

Ben Carlson: It is kind of funny.

Ben Felix: It is kind of funny.

Ben Carlson: Circle of life.

Ben Felix: All right, Ben, this has been great. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast.

Ben Carlson: Thanks for having me, guys.

Dan Bortolotti: Thanks a lot.

Disclaimer:

Portfolio management and brokerage services in Canada are offered exclusively by PWL Capital, Inc. (“PWL Capital”) which is regulated by the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) and is a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund (CIPF). Investment advisory services in the United States of America are offered exclusively by OneDigital Investment Advisors LLC (“OneDigital”). OneDigital and PWL Capital are affiliated entities, and they mostly get on really well with each other. However, each company has financial responsibility for only its own products and services.

Nothing herein constitutes an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Occasionally we tell you not to buy crappy investments in the first place, but that’s not the same thing as telling you to sell them.

This communication is distributed for informational purposes only; the information contained herein has been derived from sources believed to be “truthy,” but not necessarily accurate. We really do try, but we can’t make any guarantees. Even if nothing we say is fundamentally wrong, it might not be the whole story.

Furthermore, nothing herein should be construed as investment, tax or legal advice. Even though we call the podcast “your weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making,” you should not rely on us when making actual decisions, only hypothetical ones.

Different types of investments and investment strategies have varying degrees of risk and are not suitable for all investors. You should consult with a professional adviser to see how the information contained herein may apply to your individual circumstances. It might not apply at all. Honestly, you can probably ignore most of it.

All market indices discussed are unmanaged, do not incur management fees, and cannot be invested in directly. Which is a shame, because it would be awesome if you could.

All investing involves risk of loss: including loss of money, loss of sleep, loss of hair, and loss of reputation. Nothing herein should be construed as a guarantee of any specific outcome or profit.

Past performance is not indicative of or a guarantee of future results. If it were, it would be much easier to be a Leafs fan.

All statements and opinions presented herein are those of the individual hosts and/or guests, are current only as of this communication’s original publication date. No one should be surprised if they have all since recanted. Neither OneDigital nor PWL Capital has any obligation to provide revised statements and/or opinions in the event of changed circumstances.

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/ben-carlson-investing-at-all-time-highs-412/42373

Books From Today’s Episode:

Risk and Reward: How to handle market volatility and build long-term wealth — https://www.amazon.com/Risk-Reward-handle-volatility-long-term/dp/1804093262