Investments

Alternatives to Stocks and Bonds with John Hampton

May 23, 2022

ā€‹Alternatives to Stocks and Bonds with John Hampton

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Alternatives to Stocks and Bonds Show Notes

Almost everyone knows at least a little about investing stocks and bonds. However, far fewer individual investors are familiar with alternatives to stocks and bonds, like currencies and commodities. And of that select group, even fewer know how to generate returns, regardless of the directions these four asset classes are moving.

Todayā€™s guest, John Hampton, serves as Executive Director at an alternative investment manager. Over the last 50 years, heā€™s used systematic models to trade in these alternative asset classes on behalf of his investors.

In this conversation, John and I discuss why stocks and bonds get so much of the attention in the mainstream media, how to create a bidirectional investment strategy without setting yourself up to get burned, and how to find someone who can help you safely make these asset classes part of your portfolio.

In this podcast interview, youā€™ll learn:

  • Why CNBC, Bloomberg, and other outlets are so fixated on stocks and bonds.
  • The four core components and major markets of bidirectional investingā€“and what makes it so risky as an individual investor.
  • How alternative assets can help investors make money in times of rampant inflation.
  • How algorithmic investing can take greed and fear out of the marketplace.
  • Why black swan events like 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic prove the importance of good financial guidance.

Inspiring Quotes

  • ā€œWeā€™ve seen a lot about energy prices soaring. You go into the grocery store and you buy a loaf of bread or cereal, and you see grain markets expanding. We have the opportunity, if positioned correctly, to make money when these items rise or fall.ā€ John Hampton
  • ā€œWhat weā€™re seeing right now is a rising interest rate environment, which is bad for bonds, an inflationary period, which is bad for bonds, and an overvalued stock market that is as volatile as anything. Itā€™s not working right now.ā€Ā – John Hampton

Interview Resources


Interview Transcript – Alternatives to Stocks and Bonds

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:52] Dean Barber: Welcome to the Guided Retirement Show. I’m your host, Dean Barber. Today my guest, John Hampton, Executive Director at An Alternative Investment Manager that has been applying systematic models to trade on behalf of investors for over 50 years. John and I are going to be discussing investing in alternative asset classes to stocks and bonds. Yes, we’re going to talk about stocks. Yes, we’re going to talk about bonds, but we’re also going to talk about currencies and commodities and how the individual investor has the ability to generate returns regardless of the direction of what those four major asset classes are doing. Please enjoy my conversation about alternatives to stocks and bonds with John Hampton.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:27] Dean Barber: Great to have you here, John.

[00:01:28] John Hampton: Dean, It’s always great to be with you. I’ve enjoyed the beautiful Kansas City weather, and I’m looking forward to our visit today.

There’s More to Investing Than Meets the Eye

[00:01:34] Dean Barber: Let’s really talk about investing from the way that the typical individual investor out there thinks about investing and what you’re going to hear on the nightly news or even when you turn on CNBC or Bloomberg or one of those. 90 plus percent of the conversations when it comes to investing is either what’s happening in the stock market or what’s happening in the bond market, as if those were the only two areas that matter.

[00:02:03] John Hampton: Dean, you’re exactly right. I mean, what you’ll hear is a lot of information about stocks and bonds. In fact, the group I just spoke with earlier today, I talked about The Wall Street Journal. The money and finance page has been printed for 130 plus years. Yet there’s a lot of alternatives to stocks and bonds. So people that do what we do take advantage of opportunities in the commodities markets, they take advantage of opportunities in the currency markets. Then one of the things that makes what we do especially nice is we’re bidirectional. So we can make money when things are going up or when they’re going down, if we’re positioned correctly.

Analyzing Bidirectional Investment Strategies

[00:02:39] Dean Barber: And there’s a lot of, I think, you’ll say, John, there’s a lot of managers out there today that will do what they’ll call a long short strategy where they can be long in the market, or they can be short in the market. You can actually go out and buy an ETF that will be short the US Treasury, you can buy an ETF that will be long the US Treasury, and you can even buy leveraged ETFs that are double long the US Treasury or double short the US Treasury.

You can buy ETFs that short the S&P 500 or double short, or even triple short on most of the major indexes today and you get some really, really wild swings. And if you get caught on the wrong side of those, it can be devastating. So I’m curious about how people should feel about a fund or an investment strategy that is, like you say, bidirectional. How do they know whether or not you’re going to get it right? You mentioned an algorithm, but what does that really mean?

Finding a Financial Professional That You Can Trust When Deciding on Alternatives to Stocks and Bonds

[00:03:40] John Hampton: Dean, that’s a great question. I really believe in having good financial professionals or good professionals in your life, period. You go to a dentist, he makes a recommendation to you. You trust the dentist, you do what he says, same thing with a doctor. Well, in your finances, I mean people that they’re looking for professional advice and then strategic partners like us to you. We’ve done this for a long time, it’s not our first rodeo. You can make or lose a lot of money, long or short, if you don’t really know what you’re doing.

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Our Roots of Proprietary Algorithms

[00:04:10] John Hampton: So it goes back to our roots in the seventies. We built these proprietary algorithms, which are nothing more than just mathematical equations that actually run our money. And what’s really nice about that is, we don’t have key person risk, unlike a fund that might have a big manager like Bill Gross or Warren Buffett.

What happens when something happens to one of them, in our case, our algorithms, which have been built by very smart professionals, Yale, Harvard, Stanford graduates have actually put these things together and they’ve been back-tested. We’ve tested them with fake money before we actually apply real money to them to make sure that they do have the intended consequence. So we look at things like relative strength, trend-following, non-trend following models.

[00:04:54] Dean Barber: I think it almost goes counterintuitive to most people, John, to do something that is the inverse of a positive direction. So you say, well, bidirectional, that means we can make money when things are going down and we can also make money when things are going up. But in order to make money, when things are going down, that means you have to bet against the market going up. And when we look at statistics, statistics tell us that most of the time the market goes up. But you’re not just talking about the market itself that you’re bidirectional on, so I want you to explain more about kind of the four core components and the four major or core markets, I guess it is, where you’re bidirectional.

The Four Core Trading Categories

[00:05:38] John Hampton: Dean, it’s a great question. I think a lot of people, when they speak of market, they think of the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average and their mood for that day kind of depends on whether their phone shows green or red. But what we do is, and what people that do what we do, they do a lot more than that. So those four broad core categories that people like us trade would be equity indexes, for sure, interest rates or what a lay person would call a bond.

But two of the other buckets that are very large and have great opportunities, particularly now, are commodities and currencies. So we’ve seen a lot in the news today about energy prices soaring. It’s costing you substantially more to fill your pickup truck or your car up, or you go into the grocery store and you buy a loaf of bread or cereal and we see grain markets that are expanding. We have the opportunity, if positioned correctly, to make money when those items rise or fall.

Investing in Commodities and Currency Doesn’t Have to Be Risky

[00:06:31] Dean Barber: I think that’s important. And I think that when people say, “Okay, investing in futures or in commodities or in currencies.” That’s foreign to most people. I think most people say, “Well, okay, what am I doing here? Is this gambling? Am I taking a lot of risk? What is it?”

[00:06:53] John Hampton: Dean, if you did it on your own, it can be extremely risky. Back to hiring a good professional, if you do this with someone that’s had 50 years of experience, as a lot of people that have done this for a number of years, it’s not so scary. In fact, if you look at the risk profile, not any riskier in many cases than some of the equity indexes that they may already be in. So it all boils down to experience. You want to make sure you’re dealing with someone that’s done this for a long time.

How Long Will Inflation Stick Around?

[00:07:23] Dean Barber: Let’s go back to this idea of the interest rate environment. I want to go to the bond market. I want to talk a little bit about the bond market, because we’re an environment, as you and I talk here today, where we’re seeing the real threat of inflation being around for a period of time is very, very real. We’re coming off of a time when we’ve had a zero interest rate environment for a long period of time.

I think our 10-year treasuries bottomed out around 1% or so on the 10-year treasury. The 10-year treasury is on the rise, the Fed is raising interest rates. Right now that’s not very good for bonds. If we back up, John, back into the early eighties, that was the last time we really experienced any significant inflation because Paul Volcker jacked the interest rates up. I think there was one point where a 30-year mortgage would’ve been above 17% for a short period of time. And that actually killed inflation altogether.

[00:08:34] Dean Barber: The 10 year-treasuries, the 30-year treasuries, they had huge yields on them and those yields have been declining now on those types of investments for 40 years, but it’s changing now. So what was something that was simple, I’m going to put my money in fixed income. Interest rates are going to go down, I’m going to get that higher yield from before. My bond can actually go up in value so I can get appreciation and I can get a nice yield. You can’t do that anymore. And the 60-40 portfolio of just having some money in the S&P 500 and having some money in the bond [inaudible 00:09:06], well, where we sit here in 2022, that’s not really what a person’s looking for.

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme

[00:09:11] John Hampton: It’s going to be very difficult, Dean. In fact, Mark Twain was famously quoted as, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” So what’s interesting is, I’m talking to my 34-year old son who’s never really experienced a period of inflation. Now we’re seeing what happened back in the seventies and eighties begin to rear its head again, and it’s going to create a difficult environment, particularly for folks that got so fond of bonds and really had a 40-year bull run where bonds could do no wrong. They really, really did well there in that environment, but we know the relationship between bonds and interest rates and the years ahead could be difficult.

[00:09:46] Dean Barber: John, how are you looking at this inflationary timeframe? Commodity prices are up. Interest rates are going up, inflation’s going up. I think most people think, well, gosh, if we have high inflation, we get an economy that stagnates, we run into the period that we saw between 1972 and 1980, where the total return in the stock market over that nine-year period was about 17% over nine years, so less than 2% a year. Bonds during that period, didn’t make any money either. So it was kind of lost decade for both stocks and bonds. And so the traditional investor is grappling today with, how is it possible to make money in those timeframes? I think what you’re going to say is, you got to look outside of the traditional asset allocation.

Opportunity within Currencies and Commodities

[00:10:35] John Hampton: Dean, I couldn’t say it better. And I also would say that hiring a professional really is what people need to do. Having a financial advisor looking out for your interest and coming up with unique, sometimes out of the box ideas that can create a good return, but maybe in a nontraditional way. So yes, we do have opportunity sets with currencies and commodities that are going to benefit from rising inflation.

In fact, we have a piece I showed in a meeting earlier today that shows how much better we do during an inflationary cycle than a non-inflationary cycle. Bonds, we know, don’t like rising interest rates. They tend to not do as well in that environment. Equities can do okay in both environments. So I think of the two, in my opinion, there’s quite a bit of risk in the bond market and yet many people may not perceive that.

Some Unfavorable Projections from Alliance Bernstein

[00:11:25] Dean Barber: One of the biggest equity managers in the country is Alliance Bernstein, I had a representative from Alliance Bernstein on sometime in the fourth quarter of 2021. Alliance Bernstein had done the work, but put out not very favorable projections. They were saying that from that point, that if you look forward 10 years, their projected average annual return for the stock market over the next decade was around 5% and their projected average annual rate of return for fixed income over the next decade was 2% or less.

If you have a 60-40 portfolio, now you’re down in the 3% range, maybe 3.5% percent range on average for the next decade. Yet you’ve got people heading into retirement and they’ve been told that 4% is a safe withdrawal rate. Now we’re in an environment where, okay, how am I going to get that 4%? So that’s where your out of the box thinking comes in because it’s not the traditional 60-40 portfolio that would’ve gotten you there over the last 10 years. That’s not what’s going to get you where you need to be in the next 10 years.

[00:12:39] John Hampton: Dean, that’s exactly right. I think some of us have gotten lulled into this 60-40 set it and forget it put 60 in equities, 40 in bonds, and the world’s going to turn out right. And that actually did well over the last couple of decades, but where we’re at now, we’re going to have to think differently. Investments that came through and produced for us, may not. That’s back to change, there’s always change. You have to be prepared for change.

Looking Back at the Dot-Com Bubble

[00:13:03] Dean Barber: I’m grinning here because we did another video. I think it was part of an educational series that we had done. And we were pointing out that if you go back to the Dot-Com Bubble 2000, 2001 and 2002, where, in that three-year period, the stock market collectively lost over 40% on the S&P 500. And the NASDAQ was down over 70% over that same period of time.

But if you looked at what treasuries did or the bond market did in those three years, the bond market actually had double digit returns. So in that market fallout, if you had the 60-40 portfolio, those bonds really buoyed you up and prevented the huge losses that the people that were all stocks experienced and it worked. Yet what we’re seeing right now is a rising interest rate environment, which is bad for bonds, an inflationary period, which is bad for bonds and an overvalued stock market that is as volatile as anything. It’s not working right now.

Agricultural Grains Highlight Opportunity in Commodities That Is Close to Home

[00:14:12] Dean Barber: I think I don’t see how, mathematically, a person can say that traditional bonds can do well. There are bonds that are going to do really, really well in the next decade. But they’re not your 10-year treasuries, 30-year treasuries, or high quality corporates. They’re different types of bonds that people are going to have to go after, but they don’t even know where to go to look.

[00:14:35] John Hampton: Exactly. I think there’s always opportunities to make money, you just have to be open to looking at new ideas and new ways to run your money. And just because something worked for 10, 15, 20 years doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take a fresh look at things, particularly when we see the geopolitical environment that we have. We talked about commodities earlier. There’s just some real opportunities out there with energy prices going through the roof. We have the ability to benefit from that. But it’s more than that. You look at some of the metals that are being traded, like nickel that’s being used in batteries.

We know we hear a lot of talk about electric vehicles and batteries and copper that’s used for building materials for homes. Or in the case of ag, grains. This unfortunate crisis in Ukraine and Russia. We’ve seen that being one of the bread baskets where a lot of grains are grown. And we’re right here in Kansas, where a lot of grain is grown. There’s opportunities to make money in ag as well. These are all things that are opportunity sets that may not have had the opportunity in previous years like we have now.

Diversification Among Currencies

[00:15:42] Dean Barber: So talk a little bit about how you view, John, the different currencies. We haven’t really talked much about currencies yet, commodities, your stocks or bonds that you can be bidirectional, and you can really be bidirectional on all of these. When you’re doing that, is there a mix? Is it 25% in each one of those? Is that how you like to say you have your diversification or are there times when you’ll be overweight or underweight in one of those areas?

[00:16:08] John Hampton: Yeah. I like to tell people we’re not equal 25, 25, 25, 25, but we’re fairly balanced. And we want to stay stick to our knitting and make sure that our standard deviation stays within a certain range. We have a really low correlation with stocks and bonds. So we don’t want to begin to morph, 90% equities, if equities are going up and look so much like an equity. So we try to stay disciplined in each of those four buckets. It could flex to 30, 32% in a bucket, but we’re never going to go 90% in one bucket and 10% in the others.

There’s Got to Be Movement

[00:16:41] Dean Barber: So it would be fair to say that a goal of your strategy then is to not look like the stock market. It’s to be something that’s an alternative to stocks, could be a potential hedge. If markets are falling apart, could be a potential hedge. If interest rates are rising, could be a potential hedge. And if we have high inflationary periods. When could it be a drag? When could it be like an anchor that’s stuck on the bottom of the lake and you got to wind up cutting the line to get away?

[00:17:10] John Hampton: An environment where we have extremely low interest rates and extremely low volatility is a period that we don’t do as well. People that do what we do don’t do as well, because we need some direction. We need to know whether bonds are going up or down. We’re agnostic. We really don’t care if bonds or gold go up or down. We just want to know which direction it’s going to go.

[00:17:31] Dean Barber: So there’s got to be movement.

[00:17:32] John Hampton: There’s got to be movement. We’ve got to see relative strength. We’ve got to see a trend emerge. And if we see a trend emerge, we can make a lot of money in that environment. Where we have to be careful is where the trend reverses and goes the other direction. If we can catch that quick enough, we can cut the damage that could be done if we stayed in the trend too long.

There’s Volatility Everywhere You Look

But there’s a lot of opportunities, it’s just finding direction and in a market where there’s not a lot of vol, if you came off of the period of 08, the great financial crisis, we saw Feds take the rates to zero. We saw artificially low interest rates. We saw artificially low vics. So the volatility rating was very low. That was a harder environment for us. That’s not the situation we’re in today, Dean. There’s lots of volatility. We have all kinds of geopolitical events that are taking place and a lot of unknowns. And as you know, Dean, the markets don’t like unknowns.

[00:18:26 Dean Barber]: No, the markets hate uncertainty, for sure. And of course, as we’re talking here today, there are several things that are very uncertain and depends on when people are listening to us here, John, they could be picking this up a year or two after we did it. This reminds me a lot of 2008 with all the uncertainty that’s out there today. And if it reminds me of it, it’s got to remind a lot of our listeners or viewers. Well, it may not be unfamiliar, it’s still uncomfortable.

[00:18:59] John Hampton: Yes.

[00:19:00] Dean Barber: And you’re talking about going one way or another, shorting bonds or being long bonds or shorting the commodity prices or being long on commodity prices. I think the difficult thing for people to understand is that it can work, but it’s not black and white. It’s not just, I’m going to go pick an index fund and that’s going to be my answer.

Finding an Advisor to See Through All the Volatility

[00:19:23] John Hampton: Yeah. The devil’s in the details, Dean. It’s very complicated. That’s why we have some of the brightest minds working for us and build these algorithms that can spot these trends and these trend reversals when need be. This is not a do it yourself deal. You really need a professional working with you to help you get it done correctly.

[00:19:44] Dean Barber: Is there a handful of companies out there that are trading the commodities and the currencies and bonds and stocks and can be bidirectional in all of those areas?

[00:19:52] John Hampton: There are a number. When we started back in 1972, we were one of the pioneers in the space. There were a couple of others that came along since then, so it’s gotten very large. There are probably hundreds of companies that do that. Each of them have their own flavor or bias toward a different style. All good companies, they just do it differently. And that’s part of your advisors due diligence process, is to make sure they find the right one.

[00:20:16] Dean Barber: So what do you consider to be your strategy? What would you call it? Would you call it an alternative strategy, and alternative space? Or would it be a long, short strategy?

Following the Trends

[00:20:28]: John Hampton: Well, in years past, Dean, people would call us trend followers, which sounds pretty simple. You find a trend. You find gold going up or going down, pile into that trend, and make a lot of money. That was kind of the old school name for us. We’re what now the modern nomenclature would be systematic trading or rules-based trading, where we try to take the emotion and the greed out of the decision. We have these algorithms that really are very efficient and they can manage volumes of money as opposed to a human being who’s fallible, who could make a wrong call on whether gold’s going to go up or down. We try to take the greed and the fear out of the marketplace.

[00:21:08] Dean Barber: Those are the two strongest human emotions out there and the most dangerous when it comes to investing. So the algorithms taking that out is a big deal.

[00:21:16] John Hampton: Yes it is. And also the key person risk. When you build a firm, if you build your firm, let’s say Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett, a name that’s so recognized. But I think there is a lot of question about when something happens to Warren Buffett, who will fill those shoes? When something happens to Bill Gross, who will step into those shoes? And so we don’t have that risk. We eliminate that key person risk so our assets don’t get on the elevator and go down and out of the building every single day.

The Risk of Loss

[00:21:47] Dean Barber: John, talk a little bit about the risk of loss. And I think one of the biggest things that people get scared of when they start seeing any asset class decline, whether it’s bonds going down, because interest rates are going up, whether it’s commodities prices. They don’t get so concerned about commodities prices falling, because that makes things more affordable for them. But they do get concerned if they own commodities and the commodities price is falling. They’re concerned if stock prices are falling. People probably don’t understand how currency exchanges work, so they don’t really play in that world too much, but there are some funds out there that specialize in that. That’s a part of your strategy.

[00:22:32] Dean Barber: I think what I’m trying to get at here is there are a lot of people, if they don’t clearly know how far can this thing fall right before it actually stops falling and turns around, they think that, oh my gosh, I’m going to lose everything.

[00:22:45] John Hampton: Right. Right.

[00:22:46] Dean Barber: How do you guys think about loss in terms of that and what do you do to help mitigate that?

Setting Risk Parameters

[00:22:53] John Hampton: One of the things we do is we set some risk parameters around what we do and how much, I’ll use the term standard deviation, we’re allowed in each of those four broad buckets. We try to make sure that we don’t get out too far out on a limb. If we see these algorithms start chasing equities and get too heavy into equities, we can pull that back. We typically let the algorithms run, but there’s times when we won’t let it exceed a certain target threshold.

Speaking of risk, we mentioned currencies. There’s a lot in the news about Ukraine and Russia and the Russian ruble. And that is a currency we did trade that we’re currently not trading. Our job is to dig into those portfolios and make sure there’s nothing that’s going to blow someone up. We want to really be careful that, as things change in the news, that we’re monitoring that to make sure we don’t create an outsized loss for a client.

The Real Risk Is Running Out of Money in Retirement

[00:23:48] Dean Barber: So when you think about risk, I think about it differently. I think about it from a financial advisor’s standpoint. Most of the people that I work with are approaching retirement within the next five years or so, or are already retired. So, risk to me is not volatility. It’s not a price fluctuation up and down, plus or minus 10 or 20%. To me, that’s not the risk. The real risk that I think people at that time of their life face is the risk of running out of money or the risk of not being able to live the lifestyle that they want after the paychecks stop coming in.

And so I make that point because I think that sometimes you may look at managing money, like what you guys do in some alternative asset classes, systematic trading, and it doesn’t fit the norm, but it can actually reduce volatility in an overall portfolio. And if it can reduce volatility, and in some cases it can enhance performance, then all of a sudden we don’t want to look at what’s the risk of the strategy that you’re managing versus the risk of the stock market or the risk of the bottom market. Can the addition of these types of strategies reduce the risk of running out of money because we can get more consistent returns with lower volatility? To me, that’s where I think about risk.

The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

[00:25:27] John Hampton: Dean, that’s exactly right. There’s an old saying, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So what you’re saying is, as we take a 60-40, let’s say for instance, stock and bond portfolio, and we introduce maybe two or three different alternatives to stocks and bonds, whether it’s systematic trading or real estate or credit or whatever it might be, you might find that when you roll up that total risk for that portfolio, as you say, it may go down and the return actually may go up and that’s what we’re really striving for.

That’s what’s great about working with somebody like you and your firm. That’s your job to put the right recipe of investments together to create the greatest return with the least amount of risk. And you referenced the 4% withdrawal rule. There was an article this week about how that rule’s dead.

[00:26:10] Dean Barber: What is it, the 3.5, 6% with draw a rule or something crazy like that?

[00:26:15] John Hampton: Exactly. I referenced in the meeting we were in earlier, I had an old timer at a meeting come up to me and he goes, “Man, back in the seventies, you could get a CD that was 17%. I wish we had those days again.” And my response is, not really because when you have a 17% CD, everything you buy, everything you finance is at a higher rate. So we want rates at a reasonable rate, but not at a hyper high rate. So that’s important to realize.

Getting Educated on Alternatives to Stocks and Bonds

[00:26:42 Dean Barber]: I think the one takeaway here for everybody that’s an investor is look beyond just the traditional stocks and bonds. Look for some alternatives to stocks and bonds. If you don’t have the expertise or time to dig in and do this on your own, get some help. Get some help and get educated. If you work with the right financial planner, they’re going to educate you along the way. The one thing I know, John, is this is year 35 for me in this industry.

So there’s almost nothing I haven’t seen, and it’s not static. You don’t apply a single strategy and just assume that it’s going to take you through the rest of your life. You have to be willing to make changes, they’re not all huge changes, but you have to be willing to make changes along the way to wherever the prevailing wind is blowing so that you can reduce risk as much as possible and try to get the best return possible relative to the risk you’re taking.

[00:27:50] John Hampton: Dean, you’re exactly right. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about our relationship. We both like to read and educate ourselves and learn about things likeĀ alternatives to stocks and bonds. And we have to be open to new ideas, and the people that are sitting in the 60-40 standard portfolio, and the fear is, or the concern would be that that’s done so well, I’m not going to change anything. Let’s don’t rock the boat. Let’s just leave things like they are. And yet when things change, we have to tweak around the edges. Or in some cases, we may have to make some more drastic changes to the way we do things.

Sticking to the Speed Limit with Your Current Investments

[00:28:22] Dean Barber: You know what reminds me of? Cruising along the Interstate 70 out here in Kansas, it’s flat, it’s quiet. You’ve got the cruise control set on 75. That’s the speed limit. You could set it on 80. Some people would get a little bit more aggressive. Suddenly, you roll into a massive thunderstorm with 30 mph winds, and you never turn off the cruise control. The risk is present there. You can see it. Who would not slow down and start to take caution? And what I’m saying right now is, the risk is present. We can see it. It’s there. So it’s time to slow down, use caution, and consider some alternatives to stocks and bonds.

[00:29:06] John Hampton: Absolutely. You have to look at what’s what’s coming. I think Wayne Gretzky said, “Skate to where the puck’s going, not where it’s been.” We see these dangers in front of us. It’s only the wise person that would make changes and adjust to that. And there are black swan events, we call them in the financial world, things we couldn’t have expected like 9/11.

[00:29:27] Dean Barber: COVID-19.

[00:29:28] John Hampton: COVID-19. Who would’ve thought that we would’ve been locked in our homes for so long and not be able to get out. And yet we have to have a presence of mind and a financial team to help guide us through those. And it may mean some adjustments to our portfolios to make sure we succeed.

[00:29:44] Dean Barber: Almost always does.

[00:29:45] John Hampton: Yeah, exactly.

The Buy, Hold, and Hope Strategy Isn’t a Wise Strategy

[00:29:45] Dean Barber: Unless you’re just going to bury your head in the sand and just kind of do the, what I call the buy, hold, and hope strategy.

[00:29:50] John Hampton: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Hope is not a good strategy.

[00:29:53] Dean Barber: No, it’s not.

[00:29:54] Dean Barber: Well, listen, John, thank you so much for being here. John Hampton, we’ve known each other for a long time. It’s great to have you as a part of our program to talk about about alternatives to stocks and bonds. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

[00:30:04] John Hampton: Dean. Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Thank you.

[00:30:07] Dean Barber: Absolutely.

[CLOSING]

[00:30:08] Dean Barber: I hope you enjoyed my conversation with John Hampton about alternatives to stocks and bonds. As always, you can check out a link in the show notes where you can schedule a 20-minute ask anything session with one of our CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERā„¢ professionals, where you get an opportunity to ask them anything that might have come up during my discussion about alternatives to stocks and bonds with John Hampton. Look forward to talking to you. If you’re watching us on YouTube, make sure and subscribe and share it with your friends. Give us a thumbs up.

[END]


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