Ken Winans (00:02:41):

Lo and behold, I added up what happened in three months and I said, “Wow! I made more money than I did cleaning dad’s construction sites, and I didn’t have to go do it in the snow.” So I said, “I think I found what I want to do.” Interesting enough, my dad at childhood, the depression, was not happy about this decision, by the way. He said, “That will ruin the family, the stock market.”

Ken Winans (00:03:02):

Anyway, but I literally started trading when I was 16. I opened an account. I used to study the financial markets in between classes and at the time I ran track and field and my track stuff. So I really had fun with it. So I have had this passion about it since I was a kid, and when I went to college, never changed my major, knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I really enjoyed that part of it.

Ken Winans (00:03:26):

For me, though, turning a hobby into a profession you have to be smart about it. I mean, certainly, we’ll talk about in the moment with the audience, there’s a whole different thing about being an investor and then being responsible to other people’s investments as an investment manager. So you have to ask yourself, do you really want that other part of it?

Ken Winans (00:03:44):

With that being said, my internships were as important to me as it was actually getting the education in school. I had some great mentors when I was in college and I would encourage everybody, do your internships, so important. Learn, learn the craft. Then I was very fortunate that I actually ended up going to Chicago and trading in the commodity pits at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at what you would know today as a hedge fund, but I worked with this group, but it’s been fun watching the cycles and living through many of these cycles and living through so many of the historical events.

Ken Winans (00:04:19):

At the end of the day, the passion is that I love the people that I served. I love my clients. I love their families, their friends. It’s so funny because they worry about me retiring. I’m saying, “No, I’m not going to retire. I’m staying.” They go, “Oh, thank, gosh because I want retire and I need to know my money’s okay.”

Ken Winans (00:04:38):

Clay, it’s just find what you like, find what you’re good at, and also don’t lie to yourself. I mean, if you can’t stomach it, then get out, and be prepared for hard times, I mean, like this volatility that we have right now or certainly some of the other bear markets I’ve seen, but if you can get through those things, you’ll not only be a successful investor, but you’ll be successful at whatever you do professionally in life. I really believe it.

Clay Finck (00:05:00):

I can relate to your background growing up. I grew up in the Midwest and had a farming background. Since I’m from Nebraska, I picked up a Warren Buffett biography at age 18, and I was reading about how he built his wealth. I’m like, “This is incredible what he’s done just by studying companies, studying investments, learning how money to work,” and I just thought that was incredible and I couldn’t get enough of learning more about it.

Ken Winans (00:05:27):

Oh, no. I love reading books of people from all the different phases. I mean, I have a library in my office of old investment books. Some of them written 200 years ago. You find at the end of the day we like to think that people change or we evolve very slowly. I find that we’re still very emotional beings when it comes to economics and we still have great and fear driving a lot of decisions with people and their money. No, but when you read stories about gentlemen like Mr. Buffett or certainly in today’s world, some of the new titans of American business, they have a lot in common with their predecessors, and it is discipline, stay focused, learn your craft, be a champion at whatever you do however you do it, give it your all, surround yourself with good people, people who support you in your dreams and your ambition, and never quit. Just don’t quit. Move forward.

Clay Finck (00:06:21):

I love that. Now, you’re a big student of history and you’ve been studying financial markets for many years now and studying what’s happened in the past and how you can take what’s happened over history and apply that to your own investment strategy today. What’s your overall take on today’s market and what investors should keep in mind in 2022?

Ken Winans (00:06:43):

Great question, and I know you and I had a chance to vet some of the questions, but the way you’re asking them in the timing of this because when you and I first talked about doing an interview together, the world was a different place, my friend. Boy, it has changed in three weeks. Let me back up real quick. I think history is critical. It is one of my secret weapons when I’m out there and I’m producing the results I have to for my clients. I trust history. I trust that economics really has no timetable. We can think that technology changes things. The technology makes things faster. It definitely makes things much quicker than it used to be, but the variables and the cycles don’t change.

Ken Winans (00:07:20):

So today, we are smacked back in an inflationary cycle and I never in my wildest dreams thought that our elected leaders would be stupid enough to retry the ’70s all over again, but we have the inflation, which we’re going to talk about in a moment, the effect it’s going to have on the financial markets, the effect it has on just people’s budget and how they spend money, but more important than that, it has an effect on what’s happening with government policies, and some of these are, in my opinion, not good. We’ve tried this stuff before. It has not worked, but there’s going to have to be a shift in how people think about investments going forward versus what we’ve done really in the last 40 years.

Ken Winans (00:08:04):

We have a new variable entering the equation called inflation that we’ll talk about more detail. This is what’s happened this January with the federal reserve raising interest rates saying, “We’re taking away the punch bowl. That easy sloppy money stuff is over.” I doubt in the remainder of my life and probably a good part of yours, Clay, that you’ll ever see interest rates this low ever again. They’re going to move up. So that’s one factor that the audience needs to think about as they invest money.

Clay Finck (00:08:33):

Speaking of studying financial history and great powers of the past, here at TIP we enjoy reading Ray Dalio’s books and he recently wrote one called The Changing World Order, which is really interesting. I’m curious. Why do you believe that studying financial history has been ignored by business schools and is often ignored by just financial and professionals that are in the limelight?

Ken Winans (00:08:58):

I’ll add to what you just said, not only people who do study history, but are unwilling to make decisions based on it. I mean, I’ve always been a historian. I love history. I’ve always enjoyed it. It’s my favorite classes all through my education. I had the joy of finishing my MBA December of 1987. It’s another little fun story. I was working at EF Hutton at the time. I had a job all lined up in New York. I was going to go back to Wall Street and be an analyst, and I was reading all these stories about all these young people making tons of money back then. Then wham, here comes the 1987 stock market crash. Market blows up. The company that I was going to go to work for ceased to exist in six months. This was an over 100-year-old company gone. Think about it. Just gone.

Ken Winans (00:09:42):

So I remember, and of course, my dad, I remember distinctly saying, “I don’t know how to explain to my father after I put myself in debt on an MBA that he warned me, ‘Stay out of the stock market stuff. It’s going to blow you up,’ and here I am, I’m unemployed.” What troubled me was that all through college, we studied the efficient market theory, and the markets are efficient, and history doesn’t matter, the markets have already absorbed all the historical lessons, so you don’t have to study any of this.

Ken Winans (00:10:09):

Yet, when the stock market crash hit, it happened for the same reasons that previous crashes have happened as well. Over leverage, over valuation, illiquidity, same things. So all these theories that I learned in college basically in one day we found they were BS. What I found very interesting is instead of academia and people in the think tanks going back and saying, “The assumptions around our models, which one of the assumptions was constant liquidity, constant rational people in the markets, they would go back and rethink their assumptions.”

Ken Winans (00:10:45):

What they did, in my opinion, academia had so much money invested in textbooks, theory, that instead of going back and admitting they were wrong, they circled the wagons and defended their theories and say, “Oh, this is a black swan event. This will never happen again,” but I found, “Wow! This is nonsense,” and I did start really studying financial history. I went back and read a very famous book written by a man named Ben Graham, who, by the way, was one of the mentors of Warren Buffett, who trained him. I went back and studied Charles Dow, the father of the Dow Jones industrial average. He wrote a lot of newspaper articles about market trends, and actually very early in behavior of investors.

Ken Winans (00:11:27):

So I started that path, and then as a technician, which I follow trends in the market, that’s all historical, but why today, and I do find it very interesting, if you were to at the curriculum for the Harvard MBA program, Clay, the word history is nowhere to be found even to this day. This is after 2008 real estate bubble. This is what’s going on now. This is what blew up with what we used to call the Fang stocks or we called the brick. All these things, they don’t work. They just keep beating you up with the same stuff, but I’ll throw this out to the audience. Okay?

Ken Winans (00:12:03):

So let’s look at this way. Anybody in the audience who has a poli-sci degree, I bet you studied history. If you go to law school, what’s law about? Case study, history. You go to medical school, you learn of the arguments today about being vaccinated versus unvaccinated. A lot of that’s based on historical, what happened with vaccinations of the past.

Ken Winans (00:12:24):

So either all these other disciplines are wrong and businesses right about not studying it at all or people in business really are missing the mark. So you have to decide. You can’t be one way or the other, but I would just say that to me, it’s a little scary that you have people who might very well be running large companies that we buy stock in, who might not have ever studied the rich man’s panic of 1907, and why today’s world is not much different than the 1970s inflation cycle. They’ve never studied it.

Ken Winans (00:12:56):

So that makes me a little worried. It just really does. So I keep beating the financial history, financial history. Study it. It’s as important as your spreadsheets and learning financial theory. I think it’s equally important.

Clay Finck (00:13:10):

Yeah, I agree. They say that if you don’t study history and learn from the mistakes of others, then you’re bound to repeat the mistakes for yourself.

Ken Winans (00:13:19):

Absolutely. Clay, remember, too, that we’ve had a whole financial industry build up on, for instance, buy and hold, index investing. That all came out of those academic studies. So I think what I’m asking people is, look, at the end of the day, investing is about achieving your financial goals. That’s it? I always find it interesting that, we’ll talk more about this, but a lot of people I’ll bring up, okay, your financial goals, but it means as much to them on how they made their money versus meeting their goals. I’m saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You should worry about achieving your objectives,” and then of course you want to throw in how you may feel about certain things, but the reality of it is that when I ask people, “Okay. You believe in a buy and hold strategy. Okay, fine. Well, why do you believe in that strategy?”

Ken Winans (00:14:03):

“Well, when I was in college, they talked about this.”

Ken Winans (00:14:06):

I’m saying, “Okay, but okay, but let me ask you a question. There’s some wonderful professors in college, so I’m not trying to take away any of their success. However, your professor is not a paid financial professional. Why would you let this person who is a teacher in college dictate your investment strategy? Why? I’m not saying don’t listen to them, but you should listen to people who are actually in the trenches fighting the fight every day, not somebody who’s in an Ivy tower somewhere.”

Clay Finck (00:14:34):

Another thing that I found interesting about your approach is how you work to be pretty defensive and identify the big risk in the market. So my question is during these complex and unprecedented times, how do you go about constructing a portfolio to meet the financial goals of your client?

Ken Winans (00:14:54):

Well, you brought up a good point, and let me just say this that I’m a vet. Okay? I think anybody who has been in the service, gone to any of the military academies or let’s even forget the military. Let’s talk about sports. Let’s think about we have wonderful rounds of big sporting championships. We have the Olympics coming up soon. Everything in sports is offense and defense, everything. So I believe and history has taught me, there are times to be bold, and there are times to be cautious.

Ken Winans (00:15:23):

This idea of, there’s an old phrase from World War I, “Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead,” that kind of philosophy is what got the Titanic in trouble with the icebergs. I think that you cannot be offense all the time. So in the case of what I’m looking at right now, there should be caution. It has been an amazing bull market. A lot of people have made a lot of money, and there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I need to shift my thinking to be more defensive,” and I dare say I should think about taking some money out out of the markets. Maybe have it sit in cash. Look for better buying opportunities.

Ken Winans (00:15:58):

By the way, it’s not about picking the very top of the market and getting back into the very bottom. Clay, if you figure out a way of doing it consistently, I’ll hire you, but you can identify a culture or a climate when the markets are way overpriced. I’ve been talking about this for a year. People getting in on meme stocks, Robinhood, Bitcoin, and all the other crypto stuff, these kind of things happen near tops. People get very greedy. When see that happening, you should be saying, “I made a lot of money here. Maybe I should begin to redeploy my money or at least pull some back.”

Ken Winans (00:16:32):

Back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, there’s an old saying, “Buy when there’s blood in the streets.” Buy when everybody is running out the door, hair on fire, panicking, scared. That’s when you want to step in and start buying those things. So getting back to your original point that history’s taught me there are times to clearly be defensive, and it’s within human nature, fight or flight. There’s times to be cautious. It’s not a manly thing. It’s not a tough thing. Forget all that. It is about being smart about don’t risk $2 to go after one. Use good percentages.

Ken Winans (00:17:06):

So I put statistics. So you talk about historical philosophy. I’ve mapped out statistically as I’ve done in my books, I literally have mapped out what real estate’s done since 1830. I mean, I actually constructed an index for it, what preferred stocks have done, common stocks, commodities. I’ve looked at the statistics. The other things to remember, make sure that the data you’re using is quality data. A lot of bad data out there. Make sure it’s accurate.

Ken Winans (00:17:33):

Then the last part of it is to build quantitative models that are proprietary, that I built them myself. So the history drives the modeling, but it’s based on statistics. At the end of the day, it’s all about using statistics.

Clay Finck (00:17:45):

Number one, thank you for your service. Secondly, getting back to a portfolio approach, you mentioned that you’re able to identify when the market seems frothy and overvalued. It reminds me of when I was an early listener of TIP back in 2016-2017. So it’s been five or six years of listening to Preston Pysh and Stig Brodersen’s content. I recall them mentioning even then that the overall market was very expensive. What has your approach looked like from 2016 to now? I’m sure it’s changed over time, but I’m curious. Have you had less exposure to equities during that period, particularly for millennials and younger people?

Ken Winans (00:18:27):

So remember that when we talk about valuation, the problem is a lot of people say, and there’s always pockets of overvaluation within an overall market. I would say that 2016, the market itself wasn’t as glaringly overvalued as it was coming into last year. I mean, last year it was above valuations of the dot com bubble, which was just insanity.

Ken Winans (00:18:47):

So a couple things. When we talk about age in investing, age has less to do with it than temperament. I’ve actually found, and for a good reason, the millennials. I look at what your generation has faced in the 21st century versus what I grew up with. Your group has seen two major bear markets in stocks that lost over 50% percent of their value. You saw a real estate market blow up. Many of the listeners might have had a family who lost a home. You’ve had near record low interest rates so you never saw the value of ever having money sitting around, but I find the millennials as a group are largely more cautious about money than let’s say my generation. I was a late baby boomer from … My father served in World War II.

Ken Winans (00:19:33):

So the point being, so your own life experience has had a profound effect on how you see money. That’s number one. Number two is that within that, there’s temperament. I find people, and again, by the way, this has nothing to do with age, education, background, toughness, none of that. Some people are bothered by movements in the stock market day in and day out. They can’t handle it. They’re staring at their phone all day, looking at an app of what’s going on in their portfolio.

Ken Winans (00:20:01):

I’ll tell them, “Look, this is not for you. You can’t stay on track. You’re letting the market zigzag you all over the place and you’re not staying with the discipline.” Quite frankly, there’s some people that are better off in CDs because they just don’t have the temperament for it. Then there’s other people who actually are too risky for their own good. They are buying on margin, playing with stock options, and the only problem with it is I’m not against someone taking more assertive stance with their investments, but they need to learn to ask themselves the question, “What if I am wrong? How do I get out?” You don’t ride this thing down.

Ken Winans (00:20:36):

That was, quite frankly, one of my criticisms about crypto. When Bitcoin was hitting 60,000, that’s great. Why don’t you take some off the table? They weren’t even thinking like that. They weren’t even thinking like it at all, Clay, and that’s my problem with it is to take those big, massive hits when you should have thought it through, but the millennials in general use more technology, a little more cautious because of things. They just don’t believe in buy and hold necessarily and hope that things don’t go wrong. There’s concern about the future.

Ken Winans (00:21:05):

Certainly, I think it’s personally shameful that your generation has been handed this mess, the debt levels. Government has failed you guys on so many levels and without as much as an apology from Washington or the state capitals. So I think your generation is also accepting the possibility there will not be Social Security. There might not be Medicare. There might not be a Fanny and Freddy to subsidize the mortgage on my home. So you’re looking at it as, “Hey, I might be on my own here, and what am I going to do?”

Ken Winans (00:21:36):

So there’s a different mindset, but at the end of the day, it’s temperament. You really have to just, again, don’t lie to yourself. If you can’t handle it, don’t go into it just because your friends are. Many people are better off with just real estate investment. I talk to young people all the time that owning a house, they were fearful of it because they didn’t want to lose the property, but now they’ve discovered now that they’re working and they’re making money, “Hey, and now with COVID maybe having my own home and with rents going crazy, owning a house might not be a bad idea. So sell some of my stocks and put a down payment on a home.” You just have to find what works for you.

Clay Finck (00:22:07):

Yeah. I agree that the temperament piece is very important. That’s something that Buffett hits the drum on very often, and related to millennials and gen Z, we’ve seen this massive wave of new retail investors and Robinhood and such, and just more people are interested in finance in general and just doing things on their own. What are your thoughts on younger investors managing their own money versus working with someone like yourself or another advisor?

Ken Winans (00:22:37):

Great question. By the way, I know that we’re doing a podcast and I know that some people will say there’s a book I’m holding in my hand. I’m going to read you the title of this book, Clay. It’s called Every Man His Own Stock Broker. Okay? Dated 1791. So this idea of you doing your own investing, this isn’t new. Okay? This has been around a very long time.

Ken Winans (00:22:56):

Here’s the thing. Everybody needs to be involved in the investment process just like your health. If you’re going to have a legal problem, you want to be involved in the process. You have to. If you are going to get audited by the IRS, you need to know what’s going on with that. The question really is to what degree do you want to be involved, and is it a good use of your time versus you developing your skillset and whatever you do professionally. For some people the answer, “Yes, I’m I’m good at what I do. I have the time to study investing and to take it seriously.” So that’s number one is what degree you want to be involved.

Ken Winans (00:23:31):

Number two, are you emotionally attached to your money? For me, and not to say I’m callous about it. I mean, I run right now approximately $300 million. I could take it personal, and these are, again, people I know. They’re friends of mine. I’ve known their families forever. I take a lot of responsibility, but if I entrench myself emotionally in the daily volatility of the stock market with my friends’ money, I couldn’t be in this business. I have to use the same discipline I did as an athlete. You have to keep calm when things don’t go the way you’re planning on it. Think on your feet.

Ken Winans (00:24:06):

I think the question is to what degree also, and certainly, look, if I’m going to go buy a piece of real estate and I own my own home, I would turn to a real estate professional. I am a financial professional. I’m very good in areas of finance, but I’m not good at everything. So I turn to people where I need help.

Ken Winans (00:24:25):

So a good case in point, somebody who’s a millennial, who’s developed a good discipline for stock investing, they might say, “I want to move some money into bonds. I don’t know anything about bonds,” or they might say, “I need to move money into commodities. I heard that guy Ken Winans talk about in high inflation commodities is where you make your money.” You’re a farm kid. You tell me. Hey, the farmers right now, they’re pretty darn excited about what’s going on with crop prices. Corn, wheat, they’re all taken off right now. It’s an inflationary cycle.

Ken Winans (00:24:55):

My point is maybe they manage part of their portfolio, which is, by the way, many of my clients are this way. I manage that portion of their portfolio that I’m good at, but if they’re going to go into foreign investing, that’s not my area. They have somebody else to do it or they do it themselves.

Ken Winans (00:25:10):

So the question really is, to what degree do you want to be involved? Do you have the time to do it, especially now that the markets aren’t going straight up anymore. Now, it’s more challenging. Challenging means more time, more commitment, more discipline. There was an old phrase on Wall Street, “Don’t confuse brains with the bull market.” There’s a lot of truth to that.

Ken Winans (00:25:29):

So I think, like I said, you got to ask yourself some tough questions and maybe it is keep a portion of your portfolio for your own independent stuff, but again, let other people who are experts do that. As far as paying someone a fee, let’s talk. That always comes up, “Well, I don’t want to pay anybody anything.” Well, I would say you probably pay your doctor. God knows you paid your professors in college a lot of money. I just would argue that if you wants somebody of quality and caliber, you should pay them a reasonable fee for their services, and if they do their job, they make you money, and it shouldn’t really matter what that fee is.

Ken Winans (00:26:03):

Now, if you’re paying somebody a fee and they don’t do well, get rid of them. Don’t keep them around. Yet, don’t let the fee drive the decision on getting help. That’s a bad reason to do it.

Clay Finck (00:26:13):

That’s great advice. That reminds me of a book I’ve read by William Green, who was a guest I had on the show recently. The name of his book is Richer, Wiser, Happier, and in it he documents the lessons from his interviews with the world’s greatest investors, including Charlie Munger, Joel Greenblatt, Bill Miller, and many others. He wrote a chapter about Charlie, and one of Charlie’s lines in his interview was, “As an investor, you need to minimize the level of stupidity in your portfolio.” So one should think about the worst possible decision they could make and avoid those types of decisions. That could include going all in on one crypto or one stock or buying on margin or something to that effect.

Ken Winans (00:26:56):

Charlie Munger, you know what? Everybody knows about Warren Buffett, but Buffett will tell you if it wasn’t for Charlie, they’re yin and yang, and they worked well together. It’s a team approach, but there’s a good example. No one person has all the answers. So you find that team. The millennials are more apt to work as a team. I would say the same thing about your money. Build a good team of people. That includes your accountant. Hey, taxes are going to be a big issue going forward. Taxes are going up and as you start amassing more money, tax bills get larger. So your accounting talent, your legal talent, your need to protect yourself in case there’s lawsuits, your investment talent.

Ken Winans (00:27:31):

I would also say this that one other thing about hiring other people, you know what? I always love when people say, “I really like my investment guy.” Again, wrong question. Are they good at what they do? Now, I’m not work for a jerk or don’t hire some ego maniac, but it’s not about like. It’s do you trust them and are they good at it. If those two questions can’t be answered, don’t work with them, and you have every right to ask them for a track record.

Ken Winans (00:27:56):

If they cannot show you how they’ve done, and in our case, I mean, Morningstar, I have to face the music every quarter. It’s like going to class, you’re getting your grades, and sometimes it hurts. You have a bad quarter, you go, “Oh,” and somebody beats you up, but you need to be able to show somebody third-party verification that you are in fact as good as you claim you are. As I said, certainly, make sure you trust them.

Clay Finck (00:28:20):

When I was looking into your background, I found an article where you talked about stock market seasonality, and however January performs the rest of the year tends to fallout. Judging this year’s January, that’s probably not good news for investors. Could you talk of this idea and the data you’re seeing behind this?

Ken Winans (00:28:40):

Like putting history in the driver’s seat. So here’s a prime example, okay? So people can say, “Oh, no. I think it’s different this time.” Well, I don’t buy it’s different this time. I always love it when people throw that up. Hey, you might be right, but I play probabilities, and what I did, and again, this is my own research, Clay. I went back and physically got the data, looked at it, and did my own analysis. I’ve taken it back to 1936 and I’ve carried it forward.

Ken Winans (00:29:05):

It is true that when you have a negative January, both for the Dow industrial average and the S&P 500, and then let’s throw in the NASDAQ now, so you have three nasties, they’re all down. What happens is, now it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s all over, run for the hills, but what it does tell me is that there’s major headwinds the rest of the year. It means that I’m not expecting this to be a great year. I hope it doesn’t blow up any worse than it already has, but I just don’t think we had four really great years of big returns to have a year where there’s nothing or slightly down. That’s very much distinct possibility. So people should be making adjustments accordingly.

Ken Winans (00:29:43):

The other thing that’s important is now to take, okay, we have a negative January, let’s go back and look at what happened in other high inflation periods. Again, I talk about the 1970s where you can also talk about the era right after World War II, which by the way had logistical supply chain problems. They were missing raw materials. Same stuff we hear today was happening right at the end of World War II.

Ken Winans (00:30:06):

When you have negative Januaries and an inflationary cycle, it usually is pretty bad. I mean, you have some pretty nasty downdrafts during the year. So I am prepared myself for this market giving back most of last year’s returns. So I had been putting protective measures in place to defend my portfolios. I have been raising cash. I have been putting on hedges with inverse ETFs to the S&P 500, but let’s also very quickly talk about why January.

Ken Winans (00:30:37):

Three very important things happen. Number one, the federal reserve usually makes comments about policy, oh, and by the way, not just the fed, but every central bank around the world that follows our calendar makes those pronouncements about monetary policy. So you have that piece of information. You have the state of the union address from the president, what’s the government’s policy, most notably about things like taxes, spending priorities. Then last but not least, most companies report their year-end financials, and they give guidance for the next year.

Ken Winans (00:31:10):

Then you also have the treasury department comes out and talks about borrowing needs for the federal government for the upcoming year. So you have all this information hitting at one time and then the market digest it. I think what you’re seeing very clear this January, it is the federal reserve is saying again, “The party is over. We’re raising rates. We’re tightening money supply,” meaning credit is going to be harder to get. So it’s not a surprise, but anybody blowing off this January as an outlier and buy this dip, I would caution people, let this thing play off before you step in and get slaughtered. Be very careful.

Clay Finck (00:31:47):

I like to pivot and talk a little bit about inflation. What are your thoughts on inflation and how it will change the lives of investors?

Ken Winans (00:31:57):

Well, that’s going to change all of our lives because now, this is the blunt way of putting it, Clay. Everything today that you’re buying, whether it’s my coffee, my lunch, buy something on Amazon, a book, whatever, four years from now, it will be 20% more expensive, everything. That’s inflation and what it buys goes down. That’s it. It buys less.

Ken Winans (00:32:18):

So what typically ends up happening is that it’s tougher to make ends meet. The employers are going to start giving cost of living increases that they haven’t already. I think a lot of when we hear about the great resignation, what I keep hearing about is they didn’t enjoy the work environment and they weren’t paid enough. That’s what common tale you hear from people who quit their jobs.

Ken Winans (00:32:39):

So employers who are looking for those employees will have to pay them more money. You’re going to have, especially in the case of what we worry about with schools, any other kind of public agencies, they’re going to run out of money faster, but we constantly have budget shortfalls, constantly have trouble. So that inflation is really going to eat in to people.

Ken Winans (00:32:59):

So here’s a good case in point. If you are a real conservative person and you’ve just been having money sitting in a bank account paying 0.01% interest, three years ago when inflation was running at a half percent or 1%, you lost a little bit of buying power, but it didn’t kill you. Now, you are guaranteeing yourself a loss that you cannot write off on your taxes, you cannot make back. So people are going to have to think about the time value of having money to sit around.

Ken Winans (00:33:29):

When it comes to stocks, some stocks do not do well with inflation. People are going to have to pivot their portfolios around. We talked about commodities. I think everybody who’s an investor, however they may feel about commodities and hear all these horror stories, you hear about people blowing themselves up, they’re going to have to seriously look at commodities in their portfolio because if I am correct, they will be the number one best performing investment for the next five years.

Ken Winans (00:33:57):

The other thing, and very important, this is a long term problem. This is not going to disappear in a year. Most inflation cycles run six to eight years. So for a good part of the remainder of my career, I’m going to be dealing with this, and you and anybody out there who’s thinking about having a family, getting married, buying a house, houses are going to get more expensive, and then on top of it, interest rates are going to go up so borrowing cost are higher. If you can get a loan, it will not be as easy to get credit as it has been because banks are concerned about people not paying their bills.

Ken Winans (00:34:31):

So it changes the thinking about finance. It changes the thinking about money, and unfortunately, it also causes people massive stress. So it’s not a good deal. It’s sad that it’s happened. It’s another thing that it’s just very hard for me as a citizen of this wonderful country of ours to sit back and can’t understand why people that we send to Washington and to the state capitals would’ve done the policies that they all knew were going to put us in this horrible mess and to do it and not even apologize for it. I just really have trouble with it.

Clay Finck (00:35:05):

With this high inflation, I’ve thought a lot about bonds. I know some traditional financial planners are still putting people in a traditional 60/40 portfolio, and it makes me wonder if that’s really a sensible strategy. I just looked up the interest rate on the 10-year treasury and it’s sitting at 1.78%. Just some simple math for those in the audience, if someone were to buy a 10-year treasury that pays 1.78% and holds it to maturity during a time when inflation is 7%, they are guaranteeing the loss of their buying power because it doesn’t keep up with inflation. Bonds, clearly, aren’t what they used to be since now we’re in a lower interest rate environment with high inflation as well. I’m curious what your take is on how bonds fit in the portfolio during this time period.

Ken Winans (00:35:52):

Well, let’s back into your, and I’m just going to tweak the question a little bit. There’s no such thing as a bond. I love when people say the bond market. They’re bonds. For many people might not even think about it this way, but they’re loans. You’ve made loans to the federal government, state governments, local school districts or corporations, which is a corporate bond. Further edification is notes or what are notes? Notes are very short-term loans. So I agree with you about treasuries, Clay. The sad part of it is that many people out there who might be in some form of a pension, special people working in the public sector, if you go back and look what the public sector is invested in much of their portfolio, guess what they’re in? Government bonds.

Ken Winans (00:36:35):

So I think pensions are going to have big problems over the next decade. There are massive shortfalls there. I’ve been managing bonds for a very long time. It depends on the strategy you use, and it depends on how far out in maturity you’re going, and obviously, what are you being paid.

Ken Winans (00:36:49):

So rule number one, I came out of the last cycle of inflation and I was trained, built what we call a ladder. It means you have some bonds coming due one year out, two years out, three years out, four years out, five years out. Then you assess. It’s called shopping for yield. Where do I get my best yield if I look at corporate paper, various rated corporate bonds, some companies that might be so-so versus AAA-rated, which are very few. To me, in the high inflation period, one, you keep your maturities in. I do not think anybody should buy a bond that’s coming due any further out than let’s say six years right now. That’s a sucker’s bet. You will lose money on it.

Ken Winans (00:37:29):

If you buy some bonds today, corporate bonds, you can still find bonds that are paying five, six, in some cases even 7%, but here’s my point. If you have that ladder and think of it like a conveyor belt, the one year bonds are going to come due, pay you back 1,000 bucks a bond. You then take that and you take that money and put it out on the next point at six years a year from now. Those yields go up. You’ll be buying a bond that might be paying you seven or even maybe 8%, right? Your overall portfolio will gradually, the yield will increase as you adjust it accordingly. That’s the strategy that will work in an inflationary cycle. You just have to decide you follow diversification. Don’t put all your eggs in one company.

Ken Winans (00:38:12):

There’s also talking very quickly about ratings, this over reliance on ratings. I remember what happened in the 2008 mess. I remember that Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s had investment grade rankings on Lehman brothers two months before the company filed bankruptcy. So you need to understand, I’m not saying ignore ratings, but you also have to remember the ratings have been paid for by the companies asking for the rating. Number two, they typically don’t make a big difference of opinion on a rating between a short-term bond and a long-term bond, and they also say in their disclaimers, I find it comical, don’t use this for investment advice, which I find pretty funny.

Ken Winans (00:38:54):

Actually, you’re talking about Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett always said, “Own stock in great companies, lend money to mediocre companies,” okay? So there’s a lot of companies. I guarantee you that Ford and General Motors will probably never get AAA rated. Why? They’re cyclical companies. They have times when they will lose money. Just because you lose money doesn’t mean you can’t pay your bills. It’s a function of do you have cashflow to pay your bills.

Ken Winans (00:39:23):

So I prefer to have a diversified portfolio of medium grade to lower grade bonds that are paying me a higher yield for taking the risk, and yes, somewhere down the road, some of these companies might fail to pay me back my money, but it’s not going to blow my entire portfolio out of the water.

Ken Winans (00:39:38):

So to get back to your original point, don’t avoid bonds just because of inflation. You want to avoid areas where clearly it’s bad. Long bonds, long-term, anything long-term, stay clear of it. Number two, don’t be afraid to take a little bit of risk on some bonds in some area, but again, in an inflationary cycle, not all stocks will do well, not all bonds will do well, not all real estate will do well. I right now wouldn’t buy a shopping center. I wouldn’t own one if you give it to me. I think they’re going to have a very tough road to hoe with what’s happened with COVID. Don’t just write off an area. Know what you’re dealing with.

Clay Finck (00:40:15):

This question just came to mind for me. Do you have any opinions on TIPS on if those are a good holding for those wanting something that’s more stable but also might hedge against some of that inflation?

Ken Winans (00:40:28):

Absolutely. I think for an extremely conservative person who says, “Look, I want to leave some money on the sideline for six months, nine months,” absolutely, and the nice part is you can get into TIPS directly through a brokerage house, a Schwab, a TD, and interactive brokers or you can buy the TIP ETF. The only thing I would caution them about is just remember that they monitor one index, one inflationary gauge, and there’s always going to be a little bit of a lag. So they’re not perfect, but it’s as much better than having money sitting around doing nothing.

Clay Finck (00:41:01):

For those in the audience not familiar, TIPS stands for treasury inflation protected securities. So TIPS do pay their coupons like a bond does, but the coupon adjusts up and down over time based on inflation. So in short, your regular treasury bond has fixed payments over the lifetime of the contract. Whereas the payments on a TIPS contract adjust with inflation and helps hedge against that risk of high inflation.

Ken Winans (00:41:29):

So the yield on those will go up and down based on what’s going on with the inflation gauges, which also means the other way. Inflation cycles don’t just go straight up, Clay. They pulsate. They go up, they pull back a little bit, then prices take off again. You could find a period of time where inflation might begin to ebb a little bit and let’s say it goes from 7% to 5%. Well, if you’re in that TIP, your yield will go down. It will adjust to what’s going on with those inflation gauges, but no, I think that, again, for somebody who is a very conservative investor or not even very sophisticated, yes, by all means, you should look at things that will help keep your money at least somewhat in buying power. It will keep intact.

Clay Finck (00:42:10):

Why do you think many investors stay away from commodities? Is it something that you’ve always worked into your portfolio?

Ken Winans (00:42:18):

Well, yes and no. I think part of it is, and it’s funny, people bring up to me all the time that movie from the ’80s, Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. It’s a funny movie. It’s politically definitely not correct, but it is a good movie. It’s a good movie for economics. It really is, but the problem is, one, I’m going to throw it out that most people who have a business degree and had a class in investing, I doubt, again, same thing, not covered. Commodities were not covered. They just basically went over them and focused on equities, focused on bonds, and glossed over commodities.

Ken Winans (00:42:52):

What’s interesting is if you go back 100 years ago, it was very common for people to have commodities within their portfolios. A lot of them were like you. They came from the farms. It was logical to have wheat or corn or metals in your portfolio. So I think that part of what happened is, one, that, and Wall Street has just not been pushing it because the stock market was doing so well. Real estate was doing so well. Stay with what’s easy to understand.

Ken Winans (00:43:19):

Number two, they can bite you. They’re very heavy leverage. Commodities, by their nature, are contracts that go out 90 days. So you have to roll things. You also have to have a basic level of knowledge about whatever you’re buying. So the brokerage houses worry about the liabilities. It’s a same reason that they don’t promote people buying stock options. They don’t want the liability, Clay. They don’t want people suing them saying, “Well, no one told me that I was going to lose my money in winter wheat.” So you have to have a level of knowledge, but you brought up why now. I think you have to adjust your investment knowledge to reflect the times.

Ken Winans (00:43:56):

Again, whenever you have inflation, and by the way, global inflation, global, around the world, commodities will do well. Many people haven’t really thought about this, but when you have that part of your portfolio that’s in what we call emerging markets, most of those markets, let’s take Brazil. I can sum up Brazil in three things: coffee, cocoa, oil, the big three. That’s it. The problem is you’re buying commodities in another currency with its own set of political and social problems, but you take any emerging economy. That’s where they make their money. It’s in commodities.

Ken Winans (00:44:33):

So I’m proposing forget the emerging market side of it, focus on the commodities themselves, and learn how to do it, but if you’re going to do it, I love to ride motorcycles. So now I tell people, “Look, I drive a car. I ride a motorcycle. Motorcycles are not for everybody, but as a rider, I’m still alive. I’ve been riding most of my life, but I never forget that when I’m sitting down, my backside is not too far away from that asphalt.”

Ken Winans (00:45:01):

So if you’re going to do commodities, you got to have healthy respect. They’re fun. They’re fast. You can make a lot of money. If you like to that motorcycle ride, you better not forget you’re one corner away from hitting a little bit of loose gravel and made me laying the bike down. So you’ve got to be prepared to take the risk.

Clay Finck (00:45:19):

That’s funny. One of my first ever investments was in an oil company back in 2015. I figured that since oil was at historical lows, it’s bound to go back up and this company will do fantastic. Well, that wasn’t exactly the case, and boy, have I learned a lot since then.

Ken Winans (00:45:36):

Yeah. There’s a good example. Where you have been in the commodity? We have to extend the talk a bit about the ETFs that are now commodity-based ETFs. There’s quite a few out there. It’s the same problem I have with crypto. They’re very new. They’re very, very new. We don’t quite know how they’re going to react with this new cycle. So I’ve noticed that with some of them, they’re very illiquid. They don’t track the commodities well. Also, you’re a farm kid. You know there’s times when you harvest a crop and there’s times it’s winter and it’s cold and you’re not in the commodity, which means that you learn to buy and to sell. Most of the commodity ETFs are long only. They don’t let you go short. They’re not easy to get out of, and you can’t short them because there might not be enough of them out there, and they gap terribly. Not only that, they’re also very expensive. A lot of those commodity ETFs are very, very expensive.

Ken Winans (00:46:25):

So if members of your audience are serious about committing their knowledge or committing capital to commodities, one, the people who manage commodities, and I happen to be one myself, they’re called commodity trading advisors. In fact, I’m just now forming a whole new company to deal with this because I think the demand for it’s going to be huge. So I’m going through that regulatory process right now, but you find people who are experts in it and they’re different than stock people. You’re going to find people who really do know it. Number two, that it’s just a different animal. If you do 10 trades, six are not going to work. You will have stocks that go up. You’re going to have six losses, but those last four should more than make up for the losses and make you money.

Ken Winans (00:47:07):

So it’s unlike stocks where people would flip that around, Clay. They say, “Oh, I couldn’t handle more than two losers in my portfolio.” It’s a different animal entirely. You’ve got to change your mindset and you got to be very disciplined.

Clay Finck (00:47:20):

I’m always curious to ask financial advisors how they look at cryptocurrencies, what they’re hearing from clients. I personally own Bitcoin and really like it, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on crypto and what you’re seeing from the clients you’re working with.

Ken Winans (00:47:37):

I get asked a lot. So it is a new animal, and I mentioned before our interview that I’m very sold on blockchain technology. I actually think it is going to revolutionize real estate. I think it’s downright byzantine how much it costs and the time it takes to sell up a house or any piece of land. It’s crazy. I see crypto as these little tiny digital warehouses that are supposed to store value. Why can’t we stick real estate in those little warehouses? So I’m hoping that’s where this is all going to go.

Ken Winans (00:48:07):

My problem is this. I’m a commodity person. I’ve traded currencies. I’ve traded Yen, Euro, Mexican Pesos, Canadian Dollars. I’ve studied them and I’ve traded them. Crypto is not a currency. It doesn’t act like a currency, and certainly with how volatile it’s been this last 12 months, these huge massive drawdowns in this thing, people have to used to the volatility, and I don’t think you can dismiss it as a one wire. I think it very much acts like a commodity that you have to, I would say, treat it like you would owning gold futures or if you’re going to go trade the Euro, you need to put it in that same camp, which means you have a point where you get out of it. You have defensive strategies to deal with it.

Ken Winans (00:48:50):

So for me, crypto would go into a commodity portfolio, but I would not, by any stretch, nor would I in a commodity portfolio take all my money and place a bet on September gold futures. I think you’re just asking for trouble. Clay, it goes back to the same thing. What the audience should care about is meeting your financial goals. However you get there within reason, that’s secondary to meeting your goals.

Ken Winans (00:49:16):

Now, if someone feels they can meet their goals with being a crypto expert, great. Learn about it, but like I said before, don’t just forget about risk because when you forget about risk, at that point you are betting. There are people who can gamble in stocks. There are people who can invest in stocks. You can blow yourself up in commodities or you can be a very savvy commodity trader. The difference between a bet and an investment is with a bet, you’re just putting your money on the table and you’re turning your back and you hope for the best. Hey, that’s great. Good luck. You might hit a windfall, but what if you don’t? That’s what I’m saying. Hey, you want to go to Vegas and have fun? Don’t take your life savings and do it.

Ken Winans (00:49:57):

I do think there are people out there that have gotten used to betting stocks and might actually, I dare say, have a gambling problem, and then people need to do a gut check on that.

Clay Finck (00:50:06):

Yeah. I think a lot of people have learned a lot of lessons being in the markets lately. The arc fund is down substantially and many of the high growth names in the NASDAQ are down over 50%.

Ken Winans (00:50:17):

Yeah, and they might not recover. Everything, when you look at when things blow up and when people do get financially mortally wounded, to me, it’s always the same things. It’s over leverage, over exposure, and illiquidity. When you think about what happened to people in the 2008 real estate situation, it wasn’t that they were bad properties, but they had too much debt, they couldn’t get out, and they were stuck, and they couldn’t absorb the exposure.

Ken Winans (00:50:43):

So you always need to ask yourself, “Am I over exposed?” As I said earlier, there’s nothing wrong with having a process to remove risk from your portfolio, which means take some profits, take some money off the table, redeploy it to some other areas. There’s nothing wrong with doing that.

Clay Finck (00:51:01):

What is the biggest mistakes you see with the clients you’ve worked with over the years?

Ken Winans (00:51:07):

I would say there is the greed bug because in my case, the portfolios we run, we have all bonds. We have 25/75, meaning 25% growth, 75% bonds, 50/50, 75/25, equity, and then we have trading accounts that would also include the commodity stuff. So we have these portfolios. So my worry is that I’ve seen through my years where somebody who let’s say personality-wise and everything is a 50/50 person. They’re balanced. So the stock market goes up. They decide to change their allocation to 75/25, and I’m saying, “Okay. You didn’t want to do that when the market was lower, but now that the market’s gone higher, now you want to take on more risk?” or the other people I see, and I have actually had this happen where I am ordered to liquidate a portfolio at a bottom and I am not to reinvest it.

Ken Winans (00:52:01):

Actually, it’s interesting. Back during the 9/11 attacks when the stock market shut down for a week, a gentleman who was an accountant, was a well-trained accountant, ordered the liquidation of his portfolio the day after the market reopened, and I warned him. I said, “You are making a historically significant error. We’re going to war. Markets go up, not down.”

Ken Winans (00:52:22):

He said, “No, it’s different this time. Get me out.” So he got out at the very bottom. The market then shot up 30%, and later on on, he fired me because I wasn’t assertive enough in telling him not to do that. You can’t win. I actually call it portfolio politics. You have to keep people in track. You have to keep them focused on things and you give them the knowledge to help them understand what they’re trying to do. I’m not trying to give them a snow job, but I know them better than themselves in many cases. I’m trying to get them to not order me to do things that will be at their detriment. So it happens all the time.

Ken Winans (00:52:55):

You have to be able to read people in my line of work. I love it when people say, “Well, I really don’t like people, but I want to manage money. I want to be a money manager.” It won’t work, trust me, because they’re not going to trust you. They’re going to think you’re an idiot and they’re just not going to trust you.

Ken Winans (00:53:08):

Other mistakes I’ve seen would be we’re in a world of digital echoes. They’re following something on Facebook. They’re listening to Jim Kramer on CNBC. They’re reading something on a blog and they’ll call me and say, “Well, they’re telling me something different than you’re telling me,” and I’m saying, “Well, look, I’m not saying don’t listen to these people, but they don’t manage your portfolio. I do. I know this portfolio well, and that information they’re giving you is a scattershot. It’s meant to appeal to a broad base of people, but it’s not specific to your situation.” So we have that.

Ken Winans (00:53:42):

Last but not least, taxes. I’ll have people, too, “Look, I don’t want you to sell that stock because I don’t want to pay any taxes,” and then I see these stocks lose out their value. It would’ve been far better to have paid a little bit of tax or donate some money to charity. Take some of those shares and give it to charity and take a tax ride off, but to sit there and take a massive hit because you didn’t want to pay long-term capital gains, that’s just downright stupid financial planning. Wrong reason to do it.

Clay Finck (00:54:11):

March 2020 was the first time I’ve seen mass panic in the stock market. There were just so many people acting out of pure emotions when it came to their stocks thinking that it was all over and everything was going to zero. Having the temperament to keep your emotions in check during the good and the bad times is just so important.

Ken Winans (00:54:32):

Clay, you’re right, and I’ll just add. Look, I’m not heartless. I mean, it hurts me to see hard fought gains blow up, but I mean, again, you have to have the discipline to stay on track. I would say this that, one, if it’s okay with me saying it, go read some of my Forbes articles that are on forbes.com, and one of the things I talk about in those stories is about hedging. I’m concerned that there’s a lot of financial people out there, whether their firms won’t let them talk about it or they just don’t believe in it, there is a third choice and it’s something, again, from my commodity background. I mean, farmers hedge crop prices all the time. Manufacturers hedge costs all the time. Why should investors not hedge when they’re not sure about things? It’s been done for hundreds of years, but the problem is, again, Wall Street is so wedded to buy and hold, buy for the long term that the idea of hedging is counter to what they’re trying to sell people.

Ken Winans (00:55:29):

So I would tell your audience, if you’re going to work with an advisor, if they do not have a strategy that allows you to hedge or lock in profits, whether it’s using stock options, whether it’s us doing a market hedge within for first ETFs, if they’re not knowledgeable in that, then I would tell you that going forward you better find somebody who is because you will need help with that. Anybody in this audience will need help with doing that stuff.

Ken Winans (00:55:55):

So you talked about March 2020. That’s what I did. We put in hedges on the portfolio. So we didn’t necessarily go out and sell everything. We sold a few things, but we put hedges on. When the market was down 30%, I think we were down 10. Then at the bottom, I took the hedges off and I had money to go in and start buying stocks going forward. So it worked well, but again, the clients wouldn’t have been able to do it, wouldn’t have known what to do, how to do it, might not have emotionally been willing to do it. So those are the skills that you should expect from any kind of help you seek in the markets.

Clay Finck (00:56:29):

Very interesting. Before I give you the handoff to tell us a little bit more about your business, I’d like to ask, are there any books outside of your own you’d recommend to our audience to help further their education? Have there been any books that have been fundamental to your development as an investor?

Ken Winans (00:56:50):

Absolutely. The thing is realize that you have fundamental analysis and you have technical or statistical analysis. So I think it’s important. A gentleman like Warren Buffett, where he manages many billions of dollars, for him to try to do chart work, it’s too big. He’s like a big, giant tanker. He can’t navigate through the canyons very well. Someone my size, I can go into the shallow waters a little easier.

Ken Winans (00:57:15):

So I would say definitely go back and read. There’s a wonderful book on technical analysis. It was written actually originally in the 1960s called Technical Analysis written by Edwards and Magee. It’s very statistical. It is not for somebody who does not like numbers, but it’s necessary. Okay?

Ken Winans (00:57:34):

Number two, I mentioned Ben Graham’s books on security analysis. He wrote these books in the 1930s when the world was a pretty darn scary place. These are some of the bibles of our industry, Clay. I do think now, I quote them in my book, Investment Atlas one and two, I do quote and I try to embed what I learned from those other books, but I do think, I love people who tell me, “Oh, I don’t believe in charts. I don’t believe in technical analysis.” Well, you know what? I have news for you. Price does lead nudes, and that’s fine if you don’t want to believe in it, but just realize there are people out there who do, and they do follow those lines and those moving averages and they will make decisions based on it. So I would encourage it. Even if somebody doesn’t want to follow technical analysis, they should learn enough about it to understand what makes a guy like Ken Winans tick.

Ken Winans (00:58:25):

The other thing, there’s an annual book that comes out every year. You can get it. Also, it’s on a website as well. It’s called The Commodity Yearbook. So if you’re interested in commodities, I get it every year. It talks about what happened the previous year, projections on droughts, projections on geopolitical issues. So if somebody does want to get into commodities and they’re talking to an advisor, they should learn a bit about why does Ken like gold, why does he like crude oil. They’re not fortune telling books, but it lays out the economic facts of what might be going on in the Midwest with a possible draft that might hit next year. So I think it’s important on a knowledge.

Ken Winans (00:59:03):

Last but not least, I’m asked all the time what do I read? I still read the Wall Street Journal. I read Barons, Financial Weekly. I read The Economist. Of course, I read Forbes, last but not least, and I do. I try to gain knowledge and I’m aware there might be certain biases, but certainly, I believe in reading what’s going on and to be aware of things and be willing to read someone else’s opinion that’s counter to mine.

Clay Finck (00:59:29):

Awesome. I’ll be sure to link all of those books in the show notes for those in the audience that are interested. Ken, before I let you go, where can the audience go to connect with you?

Ken Winans (00:59:40):

Well, there’s a couple of places. So we talk about me. There’s Ken the author, Ken the writer for Forbes, there’s Ken the money manager, and then I also am a big fan of the Space Program so you’ll probably see that. So there is kenwinans.com, which is my old website. My company’s website is winansinvestments.com, and there I practice what I preach. You can find the Morningstar reports on how we’re doing, my track record and all those things. I would say that if you’re interested in my books, you can buy them on Amazon. They’re both digital and print copies. Just look up my name, Ken Winans, and it’ll take you to my Amazon author’s page.

Ken Winans (01:00:20):

Then last but not least, for Forbes, just go to forbes.com, look up Ken Winans, and I’ve been writing articles there since 2004. I would encourage people to go back and read because I will tackle tough discussion points. I will talk about politics and investing and lay out an argument one way or the other, not promoting either party, but just saying that why an investors should think of things maybe differently. I would just ask your audience, and by all means, look, I certainly would love to have clients come from your audience and hopefully they believe philosophically as I do, but even if you’re not interested, stay in touch. I want to see your generation get up to speed with being savvy with money.

Ken Winans (01:01:01):

I believe that I need to pay it forward. America has been very good to me. I want to pay it forward and help your generation, and I’m sorry that my generation is so badly screwed up, the debts and all that stuff, but let me also say positive. I admire your generation in a lot of respects. You guys have had to deal with some pretty weird stuff in your life when it comes to my money and you’re still willing to get involve and learn. So that’s all I’m suggesting. Come with an open mind. You might not agree with what I have to say, but if the audience is interested in getting my opinion on something, I will give you an unfiltered view on things you might not like, but I’ll tell you how I feel.

Clay Finck (01:01:41):

Thank you, Ken. I really appreciate you coming on and being willing to share your knowledge with our audience. I find it really interesting how you take this unique approach that I think many financial planners I’m seeing are missing and just taking a totally different approach that I find refreshing. Thank you again for coming on.

Ken Winans (01:02:01):

Thanks, Clay. You take care.

Clay Finck (01:02:03):

All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app so you can get these episodes delivered automatically. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to check out our website, theinvestorspodcast.com. There you’ll find all of our episodes, some educational resources we have, as well as some tools you can use as an investor, and with that, we’ll see you again next time.

Outro (01:02:26):

Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consultant a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.