Michael Gayed (02:46):
So you get that. I joined the family firm after I graduated from college. My father was a CIO, chief investment officer. He passed away in ’08. Lehman Brothers happen. My whole world is in shambles between the personal pain plus the professional disaster. Right? Because I had no name. I had no credibility. I had no connections. Who am I? I’m a guy that just got my CFA charter in ’08. My father passes and Lehman Brothers happen.

Michael Gayed (03:12):
So it’s like an unbelievable time in my life. And the question you asked, which is what’s the one thing that kind of learned most from my father is you got to find a way to persevere. He has a quote in his book, Intermarket Analysis and Investing about perseverance and having gone through the personal and professional pain and really resetting my future course. That lesson of perseverance is what got me to where I am today whether it’s where I hoped it would be or not is irrelevant. I kept on moving forward because I had no choice.

Trey Lockerbie (03:44):
First of all, I’m sorry for your loss. You mentioned Bob Farrell’s 10 rules. I’m wondering if you have adopted those 10 rules for yourself if any of them stand out to you? There’s a couple of interesting ones on the list. I’m just curious if any of them are ringing as truth for you or if there’s any that you challenge?

Michael Gayed (04:03):
So if you follow me on Twitter, @leadlagreport, there’s a line that I say, a tweet that often gets a lot of engagement, which is arguably a derivative of one of Farrell’s rules, which is opportunity always exists when the crowd thinks he knows an unknowable future. The rule that that’s probably the most tied to for Farrell is if everybody thinks one way, it’s going to be the exact opposite, which is basically an argument for contrarianism to some extent. That one always to me resonated because the one commonality that everybody has in this industry is nobody can predict tomorrow.

Michael Gayed (04:34):
I really do believe this. No amount of intelligence increases the clarity of one’s crystal ball. I want to see all these DCF models, all these macro models for stocks in 2018 to see if they anticipated COVID or if they anticipated Lehman Brothers or the summer crash of 2011 or anything that was a tail event in markets, which often define generations of returns, candidly.

Michael Gayed (04:55):
So if you have that viewpoint that nobody can predict the future, well, then it’s a question of expected value. Probability times payout. If everybody thinks one way, they’re all betting on the same pot. Well, that means that you’re splitting that pot up among many, many, many participants. Those participants could be right, but the payoffs can be small because everyone else is betting on that pot.

Michael Gayed (05:15):
If you bet the other way, you’re not making a bet that you’re going to be right, you’re making a bet that the expected value is going to be a lot more than betting with a consensus. And that’s a nuance I think in the way people tend to think about contrarianism. It’s not a function of just being negative or being positive at extremes, it’s trying to see what is it that the crowd is so certain of. Because if they’re so certain of it, they’ve bet on that outcome, probably with a hundred percent conviction. Again, the payout is a bit higher bending the other way.

Trey Lockerbie (05:42):
It seems like there’s a lot of conviction out there to your point right now about the market can only go up, right? There’s a lot of interesting case points for that. I’m wondering where you stand on that side of the aisle? How contrarian you are at the moment with the markets and how bullish you are on maybe the next 10 years?

Michael Gayed (06:02):
I’m a big fan of Nassim Taleb’s work, Black Swan, Antifragile. I very much take his viewpoint on predicting the future, which is that the future is far less predictable than it ever was because of leverage, because of all these moving parts. We’re in a chaotic system and butterflies can create massive hurricanes in such a complex arena. Now, the one thing that we know, or at least going to have a high degree of some certainty is that we’re going to probably keep on seeing ongoing manipulation by central banks, by policymakers, because they have to keep this thing going up and up and up, given the sheer amount of debt that keeps going up and up and up.

Michael Gayed (06:40):
I can make an argument to you that next 10 years markets will probably keep going higher, but you could have several 20, 30, 40% type declines in between. And that’s more of the world that I tend to live in from the standpoint of this kind of risk-on, risk-off mentality. What matters to me is not so much the endpoint and the trend, it’s the path with which you get there, the sequence of returns. And that’s kind of the joke about buy and hold, right? Because you can be optimistic about the future.

Michael Gayed (07:07):
I would argue that the reason buy and hold works is large because very few people actually hold because the sequence of returns prevents them from holding cause their emotions get the better of them. So it’s like on a job interview if somebody says to you, “What’s your five-year plan?” And deep down, you want to say, “Listen, I’m only trying to get past the next week. No one really knows very long-term.”

Michael Gayed (07:27):
But I do think from a contrary perspective, it’s not so much about the direction of stocks longer term, but again, that sequence of returns. Greenspan was very prescient when he published his book, The Age of Turbulence because every age of turbulence needs an age of moderation before it. Every period of high volatility needs a period of conviction of low volatility being extrapolated out into the future because of the most recent past.

Michael Gayed (07:53):
Again, given the sheer amount of debt, there is in a system, the thing I’m most confident on, and the thing that I’m most bullish on is more downside surprises that you’re going to see more of these real big air pockets that scare everybody that may ultimately come back and could come back very quickly, just like we saw with COVID. But I think it’s going to be a much rockier ride. Again, I’m hoping for that, right? Because that’s the world I live in is because of the ATAC funds, I ran and the risk-on, risk-off mentality I bring to the table.

Trey Lockerbie (08:18):
So given your experience coming into the industry, right at the time of the great financial crisis, the global financial crisis and Lehman Brothers collapsing, et cetera, I have to question a bias there, especially with what you just said, because I saw a quote recently, I can’t remember who it was, but it was something to the effect of the market just went down 5% last week and everyone started panicking, right?

Trey Lockerbie (08:42):
The person I was following said, “Look, this is not how it works. At the top of a market, people don’t panic at 5% sell-offs. They’re indifferent. You get to this place of euphoria. Going back to Bob Farrell’s 10 points, one of them is people buy the most at the top. Right? So it seems like if you add those two things together, it sounds like we still have a bit of potential, I guess, for a crash up before things get a little bit more high volatilities, you mentioned. What’s your take on that?

Michael Gayed (09:12):
It’s a very good discussion point. So I know I’m biased. Everyone is biased. By the way, there’s a lot of studies on behavioral finance that show that just because you’re aware of a bias doesn’t mean you can prevent it. My bias is I always want to see risks off. I want to see some volatility. I say that selfishly because… And I’ve proven this in these different papers that we’ll talk about. Alpha comes not from being up more, it comes from being down.

Michael Gayed (09:34):
If you really want to outperform, it’s not about taking on more risks, it’s about taking on the right risk at the right time, which is after a risk-off. And that’s why it’s so hard to beat the market on the upside unless you use leverage, right? You can outperform the market over long periods if you can cut off the tails or the extreme decline. And you can do that by identifying conditions that favor it.

Michael Gayed (09:55):
That’s how I stand out. The mutual fund that I run, the ATAC rotation fund last year was up 72%. Not because I did anything magical, but because I had a risk-off moment and the signal used in that fund did what they historically do. They got ahead of that tailwind. Now, having said that, it’s also nuanced in terms of thinking about people buying at the top as far as when the top actually affirms it.

Michael Gayed (10:16):
Here sitting in 2021, the reality is ever since February, most stocks have gone nowhere. So when the S&P goes down 5%, it feels much worse for everybody else because most people are not… Their individual stock positions may not necessarily have the S&P. They have smaller cap stocks, which have gone nowhere or emerging markets have gone nowhere. So the pain is a little bit more accentuated because they’ve gone sideways for a long time.

Michael Gayed (10:39):
The other part of this is that keep in mind, I think the dynamics are also very curious, right? Because I saw some stats, something like 40% of fund flows automatically go to S&P links vehicles, right? 401k, automatic investing, things like that. So people are taking, I would argue undue bullish risk automatically not even realizing how much concentration risk everybody else has in those areas.

Michael Gayed (11:00):
So they get nervous because they’re automatically exposed to the area, which everyone is most exposed to putting a portion of their paycheck every day. It’s not because they themselves are doing the binds manually. Do you see what I’m saying? So I think there’s a nuance in that sort of line of thinking. I would agree that the sensitivity towards decline and the way that the VIX spikes on very minor declines show there’s a degree of nervousness, right? Which you can argue is the [inaudible 00:11:27] that markets need to climb.

Michael Gayed (11:29):
But again, I go back to which markets. If it’s the S&P that’s a different story in small caps, emerging markets, Europe. There’s a lot of nuances in that discussion. And the final thing I’ll say to that is a lot of these maximums are very hard to actually test. It’s very hard to actually quantifiably say, this is the moment where everybody is all in on equities. You can point to sentiment, but the reality is even that’s… And I’ve done tests on that. Even that’s a little suspect in terms of the reliability there.

Michael Gayed (11:57):
So this stuff sounds good in terms of conversation, but in reality, I don’t think you can really create a strategy around any of that. It’s funny, right? So there are these two stats up capture, down capture. But what percentage of the upside are your strategies, your portfolio capturing when the S&P 500 for example is positive versus when it’s negative?

Michael Gayed (12:15):
If you were to look at the S&P over the last 15, 20 years and say, “Okay. I’m only going to capture 50% of the upside and capture 50% of the downside, meaning half both ways. S&P is up 10, you’re up to five. S&P is down 10, you’re down five. You destroy buying whole performance, even though you’re underperforming on positive periods. Why? Because of the math of the downside being so brutal.

Michael Gayed (12:36):
Anyway, I mean, we all know the classic example, right? You’re down 50%, you have to double the breakeven. But you don’t need to be down 50%. Even 10 to 15%, if you’ve been cut off some of those large declines, you have more capital to compound off of. And people underestimate the power of mitigating risk at the right time. They always want to be up more than the stock market and view that as the way to beat the market.

Michael Gayed (12:59):
But again, it’s very hard to beat the stock market when it’s going up to the right. It’s very easy to do so when you have a systematic approach that allows you to play defense hopefully more correctly than not. The key part of that of course is that you cannot have a strategy or a signal that possibly allows you to be up substantially and down substantially. Down less substantially by equal managing. In other words, if you’re going to pay for downside protection, you have to give up a probably decent chunk of the upside, because you’re going to be wrong in playing defense.

Michael Gayed (13:27):
I think that’s something that a lot of people in the Twitterverse seem to forget. If your approach is to be risk-on, risk-off and you need some risk-off, you’re going to keep slowing down entering storms, never having an accident. Always being late to your destination, you’re up to capture less than 100%. But the one time it works, it really kind of saves your life, but you don’t know when that time is, so you have to keep on slowing down. You have to keep on playing defense.

Michael Gayed (13:49):
And that is very hard mentally for most people to do because everybody wants to tell their neighbors, “Look at this hot cryptocurrency that I bought and made 10X on. Look at these Tesla calls that I bought.” It might work for now, but that’s not really a longer-term strategy.

Trey Lockerbie (14:05):
One of my favorite quotes from you is, “To kill it in the stock market, you have to not get killed,” which is something you’re alluding to right now. I think it’s great in theory. I’d love to talk a little bit more about the actual practice of risk management. So I’m a big believer that strong habits start with these small actions. So I’m curious what your recommendation would be to retail investors, something small they could start doing today to help maybe manage or mitigate the risk?

Michael Gayed (14:32):
Number one, turn off the TV, turn off the financial media., listen more to podcasts like this. I’ll tell you why I say that, listen, I’ve done the rounds. There was a stage in my life, I was on CNBC and Bloomberg every other day and doing the punditry nonsense because I’m trying to grow my book of business. I’m trying to build a name, but the reality is 99% of what people say on TV, and I’m not seeing that as a slight to CNBC or Bloomberg, but the reality is a lot of these talking heads, say things without actually having empirically tested if what they’re saying has merit. And the problem of course is that as human beings, we have this natural desire to reach out to the suits there on the hill, the person who confidently says this is what’s going to happen.

Michael Gayed (15:16):
This is a buy. This is a sell. But unless you can actually empirically show that it works and can test it, and you can program it, it’s all hot air. It’s all nonsense. It gets you more trouble because it causes overtrading and it causes a false sense of confidence in again, the unknowable future. So to me, it’s more about what you remove than anything else.

Michael Gayed (15:34):
Now, from the studies that I’ve done. And this is what I address in the Lead Lag Report is this risk-on, risk-off dynamic. The joke about these five different research studies that won these different awards in 2014 is that it’s basically talking about the same concept five different ways that the clearest sort of warning signal for risk is the very thing that drives capitalism, which is interest rates. So the 2014 Dow Award paper looks at utilities against the stock market.

Michael Gayed (16:00):
Going back to the late ’20s, the utilities outperformed the market. Historically stock market volatility tends to rise. What’s the causation? Utilities are the most bond-like sector of the stock market. They move based on interest rates, changes in the demand for money itself changing which means changes in liquidity, changes in volatility. Same dynamic with the treasury. Same dynamic with lumber to gold, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about.

Michael Gayed (16:20):
But all of those are interest rates sensitive relationships that tell you something about changes in something that is the key driver to what drives the economy, the cost of capital. Now, I am very much of the belief that anybody that’s a newer trader that wants to do back-testing and follow an approach or signal to focus on just one approach or one or two signals.

Michael Gayed (16:42):
The thing that I often see is a lot of people have these wildly complicated strategies that have 10, 15, 20 variables that they can show is a perfect predictor of the future. The problem with complex strategies, going back to the Antifragile way of thinking about things from Nassim Taleb, the more complexity there is, the more fragility there is because every single variable in any equation that’s meant to model out the future has an error attached to it.

Michael Gayed (17:09):
Well, that means every single error from every single variable then has a correlation to another error and another variable. And that’s how you have these butterflies effects. That’s why a lot of these hedge funds that were legendary having these very complex models end up blowing up continued time and time again. I’m much more of the opinion that if you’re going to invest in trade focus on one or two things that might explain 60 to 70% of why markets do what they do and accept the truth. The truth is that the rest is probably randomness and noise, then try to over-optimize and that’s the sort of the second rule, don’t try to find the perfect strategy. It doesn’t exist.

Trey Lockerbie (17:41):
Well, you touched on some of that award-winning research you’ve written, and I want to go through each of the four papers, sort of one by one. Let’s start with the Leverage for the Long Run. Talk to us about when delay on the leverage and when we absolutely should not?

Michael Gayed (17:56):
There’s a lot of behavioral biases towards leverage, certainly towards the bottoms. It is factually true that pretty much every single major extreme in the economy and markets has one thing and one thing only in common, which is leverage. I can even take it back further and say that every single revolution in society has been driven by leverage and the wealth gap to that wide, that causes, or that enables widening of the welfare.

Michael Gayed (18:20):
Now, the key finding in that paper is, okay, so you don’t want to leverage, obviously when things are falling apart, but you have a massive drawdown. And the enemy of leverage is volatility, right? So the more volatile, the more swings are for the stock market. More leverage hurts you because you’re basically levering at the exact wrong time. You’re going two or 3X the market when it’s down 2% and then you’re actually leveling up more after you’ve had a gain when it could then go back down, and that’s where volatility hit you. It’s called the constant leverage crap.

Michael Gayed (18:50):
So if you go with me, that volatility is the enemy of leverage. Well, then the question becomes, “Well, how do you identify volatility?” So what that paper does is it goes to everybody’s favorite indicator, the moving average. Now, a lot of people I think when you hear in the media, “Oh, stocks are above moving average. They’re trending higher because they’re above their 50-day, their 200-day moving average.”

Michael Gayed (19:10):
They completely get it wrong as far as what a moving average really does. Moving averages don’t tell you about trends. Moving average tells you only about volatility. If they told you about trend simple 200-day moving average crossover would beat buy and hold. It doesn’t. I can show that quantitatively, any number of markets, any number of indicators because they’re false signals.

Michael Gayed (19:29):
So the uniform finding in that paper is that when you’re above a 200-day moving average, whether it’s stocks, bonds, commodities, or below, and even more time periods, 50-day, 10-day. Volatility is lower when you’re above a moving average. Volatility is higher when you’re below a moving average. Right? So, okay. Then let’s use that as your trigger. Lever up when you’re in low volatility when you’re doing above a moving average.

Michael Gayed (19:49):
De-lever when you’re below the moving average. And what you find is that that’s really the only way to properly time Leverage for the Long Run. In other words, that’s the only way to really not suffer severe drawdowns because severe drawdowns happen with severe volatility. Severe volatility has to happen when you’re below the moving average. That’s sort of the key finding.

Michael Gayed (20:06):
A lot of people are surprised by that paper because it’s actually arguing more for risk management than taking on more risks. The magic comes from the de-leveraging, not from the re-leveraging. That’s the key part of that.

Trey Lockerbie (20:16):
Wow, that’s incredibly fascinating. The next one that really stood out to me is the correlation between assets because I’m really interested in that kind of thing, especially right now. Talk to us about the thesis behind lumber. It’s called Lumber Worth its Weight in Gold. So talk to us about the correlation between lumber and gold.

Michael Gayed (20:33):
Yeah. It’s always been the paper that got the most attention. Certainly, this year in 2021, because lumber spiked and then subsequently collapsed. And it’s funny because I get people that would poke holes at it saying, “Oh, it’s some random relationship.” And these people, meanwhile, they’re saying that from their home, which has about 16,000 board feet of lumber.

Michael Gayed (20:51):
So it’s not that it’s some magic relationship. Why is lumber relative to gold in this story of anything related to the stock market is because housing is the biggest driver of wealth? And the average home has about 16,000 board feet of lumber. So if housing is the biggest driver and most important aspect of the wealth effect, housing is what most people’s, again, wealth is in.

Michael Gayed (21:12):
So lumber is a key component of that, and as lumber performs because of the long tail construction, as lumber performs, it tells you a lot about risk. It tells you a lot about credit creation, inflation, growth expectations, so on and so forth. Now, why compare it against gold? Because historically gold in many ways, similar to treasuries tends to be a risk-off play, meaning that when you have high volatility in the stock market, at least for a moment in time, gold tends to do fairly well during a flight to safety mode.

Michael Gayed (21:39):
So when you compare the most cyclical commodity lumber to the most non-cyclical commodity gold and it tells you a lot about volatility. Same dynamic as moving averages. And it’s interesting because usually when lumber is weak relative to gold, you’re below a 50-day or 200-day moving average. When lumber is outperforming gold, your risk-on, you’re above moving average.

Michael Gayed (21:58):
Again, I go back to this kind of writing the same concept in different ways. Lumber surge this year by disruptions sawmills, all this stuff and then collapsed. Treasure yields kept dropping since mid-March. The signal was actually kind of right because it was signaling that there was the risk of risk-off of high volatility.

Michael Gayed (22:17):
It was a false signal at least so far with hindsight, but you still made money in treasuries while being wrong in the signal. That’s another thing which I think is important. Anybody that looks at the research I’ve put out there. People get obsessed with a single indicator and they get obsessed with saying your indicator was wrong.

Michael Gayed (22:33):
I don’t care about the indicator is wrong. I care about being wrong and making money, which means that it’s more than just evaluation of a signal, it’s also about the opportunity set with which you’re executing on your signal. So for example, lumber outperforms gold. You want risk-on exposure. Gold outperforms lumber. You want a risk-off exposure. Treasuries allow you to be risk-off and make money, even if you’re wrong.

Michael Gayed (22:55):
The other dynamic is generally when lumber to gold is weak. Small caps, underperformed, large caps, which by the way has happened. Now, what’s the thinking there? Well, lumber is a play on again domestic consumer strength and wealth effect, housing. Small caps are more sensitive to the domestic economy. Large caps are multi-national. Who would stand to reason that if lumber is doing well, that you would want more sensitivity to the US economy, which is what small caps afford you? Otherwise, you want more safety from the diversification of large-cap, multinational revenue streams.

Michael Gayed (23:25):
Another example of how it works, even though you can say with hindsight the signal was wrong in terms of being risk-off, small caps have done nothing since February, right? So again, I go back to, there’s a lot of nuances with any strategy. It’s more than just on or off-market going up or down or even volatility going up and volatility going down and tell us about the interaction of different parts of your opportunity set and the opportunity set in many cases can be more important than the signal itself.

Trey Lockerbie (23:49):
When you were mentioning the 50-day, 200-day moving average as a signal, what’s the benchmark there? Are you talking about the S&P being below its average and therefore looking at the signal of that indicator?

Michael Gayed (24:00):
Well, what’s fascinating is that it pretty much is true across almost every single major asset class, meaning S&P, Dow, individual stocks, high yield bonds, corporate credit that you ended up having these sort of underreaction, streakiness when you’re above a moving average. More consecutive updates whereas when you’re below, you have more volatility, more seesaw, more extremes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s equities or bonds or commodities as well. You see the same type of volatility change, irrespective of what asset class, what benchmark.

Trey Lockerbie (24:31):
Very interesting. Let’s go on to An Intermarket Approach To Beta Rotation paper because I have a lot of questions I think about this, especially around volatility. So let’s start there.

Michael Gayed (24:42):
So that one, the 2014 Dow award, and that was the one that started it all. It has the longest history, and it goes back to the 1920s. So again, utilities outperform the stock market. Generally, stock market volatility tends to rise. One of the stats in that paper shows that in the top 1% of VIX spikes, those real collapses inequities. Historically, utilities are already leading 75% of the time before that top 1% VIX spike takes place.

Michael Gayed (25:10):
We warned you in advance of the conditions. Now, by the way, that doesn’t mean that every time utilities lead, you have an extreme VIX spike is that when you have an extreme VIX spike, utilities tend to already be leading. And we should revisit that because that’s actually an important distinction.

Michael Gayed (25:22):
Now, 75% of the time, it’s pretty good. But of course, that means 25% of the time it misses it. And I always use that line on Twitter at the Lag Report, no signal is infallible in the small sample. Just because it’s training, doesn’t mean you’ll crash. Just because it’s sunny, doesn’t mean you won’t. There’s nothing that’s foolproof. So you have to play these probabilities based on indicators like utilities, play defense, recognizing that you could be wrong both ways, risk-on or risk-off. But more often than not, the odds are in favor. You can get it right when you most need to be right.

Michael Gayed (25:54):
The interesting thing about utilities as a sector, going back to the ’20s is that’s a fairly remarkable and consistent phenomenon, meaning independent of legislative events that affected the utility sector independent of the decade. You tend to see that dynamic where if utilities are outperforming in the short term with a lag stock market volatility on average rises afterward, which means to me at least there’s a degree of conviction that that’s an anomaly that will probably persist because it’s already lasted for so many decades.

Trey Lockerbie (26:22):
I want to stick with that car analogy because I love it. And this idea of utilities telling the weather of sorts. So talk to us about how to actually track utilities and when we should be keeping an eye on the VIX, for example.

Michael Gayed (26:38):
The VIX, as you know tends to be much more reactionary to volatility. So it’s volatility. The thing of the VIX has like the mile mark you crash your car. Utilities are the rate to that extent. And a very simple way of tracking it is you can just use ETFs like the utilities ETF, XLU relative to the S&P if utilities are outperforming over a very short-term basis, up more down, less relative. That will be your warning sign to play defense or to be careful.

Michael Gayed (27:07):
At least de-risk a little bit, be mindful of that. Recognizing, and it could be a false signal. Now in my world, the way that I run my ATAC funds, whether it’s the mutual fund or the RORO ETF or the JOJO bond ETF, my approach is to be all in. Meaning when I go offense or defense, when I go risk-on or risk-off based on these signals, it’s a full-on switch between the offense, equities, or junk debt, is a rural or JOJO respectively, or all in treasuries as the expression of risk-off.

Michael Gayed (27:33):
Most people are not going to do that, obviously. But at the margin, you can de-risk meaning you either take less leverage or maybe tactically place some options overlaid to definitely cut off some tail risk, or you can do something as simple as just overweight your bonds to the extent that most investors have an allocation, like a 60/40 stock-bond mix.

Michael Gayed (27:52):
If utilities are outperforming the broader stock market, maybe you want to go from 60/40 stocks bonds to 50/50. You go under where you’re soft, you’re worth your bonds. You’d be surprised because, at the margin, you can still generate some outperformance that way by just tactically taking on less risk at the right time. You don’t have to go all in. In my case, I go all in because the approach is really designed to be ultra-aggressive on the anomalies, but for most people’s individual portfolios, it can be a guidepost for where to be overweight and underweight.

Trey Lockerbie (28:21):
So touching on the ATAC fund, which you mentioned did 72% in 2020, I imagine as you kind of alluded to earlier, that’s because you missed the majority of the downturn? And I’m guessing it’s because you’re using something like this utility indicator. So at that point, were you selling off moving to cash? What was the hedge, I guess you’d put on at that point?

Michael Gayed (28:42):
This goes back to the opportunity set discussion. Again, ideally, you want to have an opportunity set that allows you to be wrong and make money. But when you’re right, it allows you to have a degree of convexity, meaning you get some sort of extreme move relative to equities when everything’s breaking down. Long duration treasuries typically give you that some degree of convexity and again, the potential to be wrong in any single signal, but still make money. So utilities were outperforming really mid-January last year.

Michael Gayed (29:08):
The risk-off signal was there, way before anybody was that worried about COVID, and the markets were still hitting new highs. So the mutual fund went all in treasuries, long duration and stayed there because it’s evaluating their relationship every rolling week. On a rolling basis, utility stayed strong. So it stayed in treasuries in advance of the COVID crash.

Michael Gayed (29:26):
And that’s sort of the key thing in my world. It’s meant to be anticipatory, not reactionary. So it’s in treasuries. The world is ending at least for a moment in time. Treasury yields collapsed, flight to safety. Treasuries are basically like an inverse S&P. It’s like a short position without the risks of shorting.

Michael Gayed (29:42):
March 31st, pretty much what we get for the low, the signal flips to risk-on. Treasuries start weakening. The fund after having made gains in treasuries in the midst of everything collapsing then rotates to risk-on. All in large caps, then all in small caps. It has this additional relative momentum component. And close a year up 72% because of that.

Michael Gayed (30:00):
It’s not because it was in Tesla or Bitcoin or anything like that, it’s because it did what it was supposed to do. Now, this is again, the key point of this. Do you have a risk-on risk-off approach? You need some risk-off. You need some of those periods where the market does go down. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as COVID, but you need some of those periods to thrive on by getting that treasury trade wide. You need the market to actually break.

Michael Gayed (30:20):
Contrast that to this year. This year as we speak the mutual fund, debt is down something like nine, 10%. Now, on one hand, it’s kind of like the Crimea river. I mean, it’s up 72% last year. It’s slightly down… Well, not slightly, it’s down 9, 10%. I’m not going to say it’s slightly, it is down. Why is that? Because you’re in a pure risk-on world. That’s just the S&P.

Michael Gayed (30:37):
This is also an important thing to keep in mind. Every strategy has an Achilles’ heel. Every asset class has an Achilles’ heel. I’m very upfront. In the case of the mutual fund, and really anything that’s risk-on, risk-off the Achilles heel, is very simple. You don’t have risk-off, your lag because you keep playing defense. You keep slowing down, entering the storm when the signals tell you to play defense and you’re wrong. The one-time again, that you’re right, you’re really, really right, but you need to have some of those filters.

Michael Gayed (31:02):
It’s funny because I always use this point, on Twitter. It’s like in years like this year, 2021 where it’s just about the S&P and the S&P is the only game in town. People naturally compare you against the S&P. Advisors have clients that compare their portfolios to the S&P. Home bias, it’s what’s being shown to them every single day in the financial media. But I’m pretty sure diversification means more than the S&P 500, let alone the five stocks that are driving the S&P.

Michael Gayed (31:28):
Everybody wants correlation on the upside, but they don’t want the downside, but they don’t know how to identify those periods. So what ends up happening is people take too much concentration risk, and this even goes back to your earlier point about everyone being all in. They ended up over-allocating to the winners. Payout ends up being less because too many people are betting on that pot. And then strategies like mine suddenly come into the forefront because I get some risk-off. And the risk-off happens because nobody’s really paying attention to the anomaly, which I can prove going back to the ’20s exists.

Michael Gayed (31:56):
It’s a fascinating industry because when you know your strategy, you know your signaling, you have the data. All that is basically meaningless if you’re in the small sample, and if investors are simply too impatient to diversify into things that are not working because the environment doesn’t favor it for a moment.

Trey Lockerbie (32:12):
Given that you focus so much on volatility and the VIX is a lagging indicator, which I think is really interesting, and I want to learn more about it. I just have another question about the VIX, which is that I’ve read that it’s essentially mathematically bound to go to zero, but they just keep essentially doing stock splits so that it never will, but I’m guilty myself of playing the VIX here and there, especially in spikes, especially back in March. I gambled a little bit in the VIX, made some money for fun, and it’s always an interesting hedge in my opinion, although I’d never recommended it because it’s really hard to anticipate. But I guess my question going back to the earlier point, this question was, is shorting volatility long-term the closest thing to a sure bet?

Michael Gayed (32:56):
Opportunities always exist when the crowd thinks of those in an unknowable future. There’s nothing that’s a sure bet. The clearest example of that happening is what they called Volmageddon in 2018 when this short volatility toward fixed ETFs blew up because you had a massive spike. It basically took out an entire product. The problem with the VIX, ETFs, and strategies as you noted is that they’re designed to go to zero in some ways because when you’re going long VIX, you’re not going along spot VIX, you’re going along the rolling over of the future as a fixed contract, which constantly bleeds because the natural state of markets is to be low volatility until that moment hits when volatility spikes.

Michael Gayed (33:35):
But the problem is, again, you’re wrong in losing money. Whereas again, I go back to the treasury to allow you to be wrong but still make money. That’s why it’s very hard to… If you were to take any of these signals from the papers and say, “Okay, instead of risk-offing treasuries, let me make it go long VIX or make it go short the S&P. You’re dead in the water. The strategies fail miserably.

Michael Gayed (33:53):
Now, let’s say your risk-on a short VIX, short volatility, yes, your up capture is going to be a lot more because you have a lot more potential to make gains selling a premium essentially by shorting volatility. But again, when you have a false signal, meaning your risk-on at the wrong time. Well, now you’re in a lot of trouble. A good example of that is both lumber to gold and utilities. Okay. So the JOJO ETF goes junk-on, the junk-off high yield on for treasuries.

Michael Gayed (34:18):
It uses the utility strip. The utilities are performing the market. Risk-off goes treasuries, utilities underperforming the market, risk-on high yield junk debt. The week of Lehman Brothers, the index that JOJO tries to track is risk-on meaning it’s in high yield. So it loses money as the world is ending. It’s a false signal. It’s a weekly approach. It writes itself and then goes fully into treasuries towards the tail end of weight when yet you won and treasury yield collapse and the index ended up closing the year very positive.

Michael Gayed (34:45):
If you’re short on volatility that weakened the Lehman brothers, you’re wiped out. All segments. In the case of RORO, RORO the ETF, risk-on/risk-off equities, treasuries use lumber to gold. The index that ROR attempts to track was the risk-on end of February last year as the COVID crash is just starting. Your short vol, you’re done in the water. There’s a severe hit, the moment things really started kind of shutting down.

Michael Gayed (35:06):
Again, it righted itself because it’s a weekly approach, and then when treasuries and then recovered the lowest the index ever got on RORO’s index is like 20% as far as the drawdown. But again, my point is that no signal is infallible. Your opportunities are really critical. There’s no such thing as a sure bet. Short volatility is like playing with fire because if you’re wrong, that can wipe you out, and that’s where I would caution people in terms of thinking about taking that as your risk-on opportunity.

Trey Lockerbie (35:33):
But there’s another paper you wrote called An Inner Market Approach to Tactical Rotation. Is there anything in that paper we haven’t discussed that you want to highlight?

Michael Gayed (35:41):
It’s a similar idea, right? So instead of utilities against the market, it goes juggler and says, “Well, this is about interest rates.” Well, let’s play with treasuries. And instead of looking at the yield curve on the shorter end, let’s go longer out and look at the 30-year treasury total return relative to intermediate tenure. So it’s a form of yield curve flattening. We’re very long duration, is outperforming. Intermediate seemed dynamic with a lag stock market volatility tends to rise.

Michael Gayed (36:05):
And again, the same dynamic. When long-duration treasury is outperforming intermediate and entity utilities are already outperforming. And to see lumber to gold weak, you tend to be below the moving average. It’s all the same idea. But it’s a similar finding, right? It tends to move in advance. The key thing is you have to manage risk in advance because the risk actually matters.

Michael Gayed (36:23):
It’s kind of an interesting dynamic because when I used to be on the road and present at CFA chapters across the country, and I used to always reference this study I had seen that looked at when most people hit the brakes after when they have an accident, a car crash. When do most people hit the brakes?

Michael Gayed (36:41):
The study, basically looking at all these car crashes and looking at data from the cars, found that most people hit the brakes after the car crash has already taken place. Which kind of makes sense actually, because your body is in motion. And people have to respond the same way in their portfolios. They tend to take on… It’s like why is it that after 2008, all these black swan funds got so many assets? Because they’re hitting the brakes after the crash already happened. You have to manage it beforehand.

Michael Gayed (37:04):
But again, if you’re going to manage it beforehand, you have to be willing to lag on the upside, which means you have to have the patience to go through the false signals. Again, it’s all the same dynamic. But the key thing remains you’ve got to be aware that you’re going to be wrong, but when you’re right, you’re really, really right. But you don’t know when that really happens, so you have to keep going through the false signals along the way.

Trey Lockerbie (37:24):
You have to give up a little to get a lot. I started out my career before I ever learned about Warren Buffet or anything like that, I was going through programs that were teaching technical analysis. I was really into it there for a long time. I’ve kind of shied away from it now being more of a buy and hold investor, a caveat to what I play with the VIX every now and then. But sometimes I use it. I’m just kind of curious how you look at technical analysis. What tools, what studies that you typically rely on the most?

Michael Gayed (37:53):
I’m very much quantitative in my thinking, even though I put a lot of qualitative narrative in the Lead Lag Report, but I think there are two schools to tech analysis, right? One is pattern recognition and triangles, pendants, and things like that. There are oscillators. And then there’s more sort of quantitative testing. I think the problem, and I share some of the cynicism, it sounds like you have with the field. I think the problem with tech analysis is that if somebody tells you it’s more art than science, run away because unless you can test it scientifically, which would be a backtest rules-based, you can’t really have faith that any single drawing or pattern that you see on the chart means anything.

Michael Gayed (38:34):
I think people under a few understand this. It’s one of those things that really very few people, I think really understand when it comes to investing. You’ve got to imperatively test it if what somebody says is valid has any merit from historical data. And my point is that with some of these more than are wishy-washy types patterns, just hard to actually do them. Now, having said that, I do believe that a lot of people use tech analysis in a way that actually makes tech analysis valid because everyone else is following.

Trey Lockerbie (39:01):
The self-fulfilling prophecy.

Michael Gayed (39:03):
Exactly right. That’s exactly right. And from that standpoint, I think you have to be aware of some of these things, right? Because if a lot of people are starting to buy something, because technically it looks oversold, well, it’s probably going to start rallying because everyone else has seen this oversold, then they start buying. Right? So exactly to your point, well, what one believes to be true is either true or becomes true? But that great quote kind of said it. But I think from that point, awareness is needed. My approach is much more into market analysis, which is a branch of tech analysis along with the lines of John Murphy, Martin Pring, and of course my father, under this idea that certain parts of the marketplace will move first and then there will be a lag.

Michael Gayed (39:37):
A food example actually as we’re chatting here late September in 2021, a good example of that is what’s happening with oil, nat gas, and treasury yields. Yields have been spiking the last several days, which makes sense because oil has been spiking. Why does that make sense? Oils spiking affects bonds because oil is a form of cost, is a driver of cost-push inflation.

Michael Gayed (39:58):
If oil is rising, that means cost-push inflation or pressure is increasing. Yield should be rising to reflect that. But it happens with a lag. Oil blew first then bonds react. That’s sort of different than the more reactionary patterns that I think you tend to see in tech analysis. I’m a fan of being aware of most things, but being skeptical of everything.

Trey Lockerbie (40:16):
Yeah. My favorite quote on technical analysis is that its astrology for men. I think it’s a name I saw somewhere. You’ve talked about the 50 and 200-day moving average. I’ve always had a question about that. Why 50 days? Why 200 days? Is it just back-tested to hell, did they try 49? Did computers just run through every single number and say, “Hey, this one looks the most accurate”?

Michael Gayed (40:36):
I suspect that there’s an element of the mind like numbers that end in zero. I’m sure you can find some kind of psychological test that shows that. With the Leverage for the Long Run paper that looks at moving averages. The finding goes from, I think it was 10 days to, I think, 260 days. Even if you did like a simulation and said, “Okay, let me do 11 moving day average, 12-day moving average,” there’s nothing magic about 10, 50, or 200. The phenomenon about volatility rising and falling based on whether you’re above or below and above respectively, the moving average, that’s there no matter what. It just will happen at different times, but overall the finding remains the same.

Michael Gayed (41:08):
I don’t think there’s anything magical about it, but it’s funny because to the extent that things like 200-day and 50-day are in the lexicon. It will impact place movement short term because of algorithms will trade off. So yeah, I go back to, you got to be aware of it because others may be coding things based on something that probably has no real causation behind it, but suddenly there’s causation because now there’s money actually flowing, acting on.

Trey Lockerbie (41:29):
Great point. A lot of people, especially on Twitter, and really only on Twitter, I guess, a lot of the Bitcoin crowd on Twitter has laser eyes in their profile pictures these days. And your profile picture, you have one lumber, one gold coming out of your eyes. I love it. So leaving Bitcoin aside, what is the current bull case for gold in your opinion? Because it has been lagging after that initial run-up last year.

Michael Gayed (41:54):
You answered the question by saying that. Look, there are a lot of studies on mean reversion in markets. It’s something known as the Morningstar curse, as an example, where if you were to look at the five-star rated funds in the last three years, they tend to be the one or two-star rated star funds for the next three years. So mean reversion is always a thing that you can kind of count on when it comes to markets. The closest thing to a guarantee is to mean reversion. The problem of course is that you have to know where the mean is. And the mean is always changing. That’s a whole different discussion, right?

Michael Gayed (42:24):
Okay. So let’s go with that. And by the way, I always used to make this joke on the road that means reversion is a concept that’s as old as the Bible, right? He who is first shall be last and last first is mean version. Okay. So you have basically a lost decade for gold. It was like I had a lost decade for stocks. And then from 2000 to 2008 or ’10, whatever the period you want to end it in.

Michael Gayed (42:44):
So my point is that the fact that gold has lagged for so long arguably may be the reason why it starts to work. And you don’t need to have a catalyst. This is the thing that always gets to me. People always want to find a reason for why something should go up or down. The reason is only determined after the fact. Narrative always follows price, period.

Michael Gayed (43:01):
So seven years of famine becomes seven years of the feast because there are mean reversion cycles. Now, if you think about the rule of the golden portfolio, where does that mean the reversion argument kick in from a cycle perspective, in terms of equities? You want correlation when you work towards the tail end of a bear market. You want as little correlation towards the tail end of a bull market.

Michael Gayed (43:19):
You don’t want to be concentrated in beta as a factor risk after an extended bull market. Okay. So how do you diversify a portfolio with lower correlated or negatively correlated assets? Gold fits the bill. So I would actually argue that the cycle that has been so unrelenting since QE3 favoring equities taking out COVID for a moment is so extended and you can look at valuations across the board that there’s going to be, at the margin, increasing demand for non-correlation because of how long equities have run up from a cycle perspective.

Michael Gayed (43:49):
Again, it doesn’t mean that stocks have to go down. The more volatility in stocks would suggest you want more uncorrelated assets. Well, that becomes a driver of demand for gold for many years. So I’m basically making the argument that which has lagged ends up leading, and that which leads lags. That dynamic is probably the biggest reason to want to have an allocation. I’m not making a sort of an argument to say, “Well, it shouldn’t be 50% in gold.”

Michael Gayed (44:12):
No, you should think about putting five, 10% in anything that hasn’t done well for the last decade. That includes value stocks. That includes emerging market stocks. And thinking about trimming that which has been your winner is that includes US stocks, that includes Bitcoin, cryptocurrency. Pretty balanced [inaudible 00:44:26].

Trey Lockerbie (44:28):
I have some questions around the mutual fund, the ETFs, really the allocations within them. I’m curious what your take on something like the All-Weather fund over a, say, Bridgewater Associates. That’s playing into this narrative you’re talking about a little bit, were you diversified to uncorrelated assets enough where they kind of counter it balanced each other along the way? What’s your take on that versus something that’s constantly rotating in and out of things?

Michael Gayed (44:52):
I would say it depends on the timeframe, but I’m actually a big fan of the thinking mind risk parity because the argument is that you have exposure to something that will always do well no matter what cycle you’re in. But one of those four or five, depending on how you’re defining risk parity, quarter-inch will work and outpace everything else.

Michael Gayed (45:08):
Yeah, you’re going to be lagging that investment because you’re blending it of course, against other things, which are not just fitting the cycle. But you’ll always have exposure to something that would work. I would agree that diversification means having as much exposure to as many future different paths as possible. That’s really what diversification is. And from that standpoint, I would argue risk parity certainly fits the bill better than 60/40 because stocks and bonds are very correlated.

Michael Gayed (45:33):
So now that’s a longer-term cycle order. And the thing about identifying cycles is you often don’t know if you’re in a new cycle until two to three years after it’s already changed, right? So the idea is you want to have the exposure because you don’t know exactly when the switch happens. Now in my world, the sort of all-in risk-on, risk-off is a different dynamic. It’s almost the exact opposite. It’s saying, no, the short-term dynamics favor some kind of risk, a risk-off, some kind of risk condition.

Michael Gayed (45:57):
I very much believe that markets are largely efficient longer-term, but in the short-term, they are not. That’s why all the papers, basically for the most part look at shorter-term timeframes and look back periods to determine the offense and defense. So while risk parity says you can’t predict to have exposure to everything, risk-on risk-off says, you can identify the weather to slow down entry in the storm. They’re actually very much compliments to each other, but it’s really because they take different timeframes into account. One is a much longer-term disparity. One is more tactical short-term based on very visible anomalies that historically have persisted over time.

Trey Lockerbie (46:28):
And I’m guessing you package some of these things up into an ETF because of those rotations, the transactions are more tax-efficient that way?

Michael Gayed (46:35):
Certainly for RORO and JOJO, the risk-on risk-off ETF the bond fund, JOJO? I just want to actually think that JOJO will probably be the most interesting over time for most people, I think because nobody knows what to do with bonds. If the two biggest risks for bonds are credit risk and duration, while I’m rotating around credit risk and duration, which kind of makes it intriguing. But yes, you’re correct. And Toroso, which is the parent company and we’re the ones behind not just the ATAC funds, but the blockchain ETF. BLK is our funds. The risk parity ETF, how far are we to help bring it to market?

Michael Gayed (47:08):
We’re very much in the space, but the ETF structure is certainly more ideal. Now, there is something that’s a caveat to that. In many ways, too much transparency can be very damaging to investor returns. Now, that sounds very strange for me to say. There was a study done in the early ’90s that looked at 401k participants. Those that looked at their statements monthly. Those that look at their statements quarterly. If you were to guess who had the better, longer-term performance, who had better performance long term, those that looked at their statements quarterly or those that looked at their statements monthly?

Michael Gayed (47:39):
Quarterly. They’re not seeing as much data points. They’re not seeing as much noise and volatility which causes them to take less risks because they get scared out of their position. Now, that’s a good example. Too much transparency can actually be harmful because people feel like they need to act on, what’s probably noise. The issue from my standpoint is RORO and JOJO have closed their holdings. They’re risk-on risk-off positions every day. You know from our site, atacfunds.com, what the holdings earn, and it’s all rules-based. I’m already seeing it from some people that are looking at those funds.

Michael Gayed (48:07):
They’re looking at the position that a moment in time saying, “I don’t want to be exposed to risk-on equities this week. I don’t want to be exposed to risk-off treasuries this week. Even though it’s not about their opinion, it’s about what the rules-based approach is saying. My point is that people end up panicking out because they think they know something more than something you can quantitatively test versus their own subjective opinions on markets and gut feel. So it creates a lot more noise in volume, in asset growth, and all this stuff.

Michael Gayed (48:31):
So that’s why I go back to what I said before. Sometimes less information is more because it means less likelihood of taking the wrong action because of noise as opposed to signal.

Trey Lockerbie (48:40):
With this rules-based approach, I have some curiosities around. Is this how you’ve always approached the market? Or have you been burned a few times by your own personal opinion on something that you said, “You know what? I can’t rely on this. I got to go buy the data.” Talk to us a little bit about why you’ve come to use these approaches.

Michael Gayed (48:58):
So a lot of this really came from my having to survive coming out of ’08, right? So one of them was one of TradeStation’s. Clients, users, and I learned the easy language and tested everything imaginable. I read every single white paper I could imagine because I had to live my life and I had to look for a job. I didn’t want to sit there in front of the screen and trade based on an opinion. I wanted something that would automatically do it for me.

Michael Gayed (49:18):
So I was trying to find a way to do that, route 2009, as the world is still shivering from the great financial crisis. Just like I tried to find a job anywhere I could. So it’s almost out of necessity that made me seek out something that could be automated, that could be rules-based so that I could do other things. As interesting as that was, that period when I realized that the vast majority of things really don’t have predictive power. It really is true. I encourage everybody to take time and try to actually backtesting.

Michael Gayed (49:43):
Most things don’t have any anticipatory power at all. It’s a great conversation, but it’s all a lot of nonsense. Which is why I’m very skeptical of a lot of strategies that are out there. But that’s always been sort of my preferred way. I’ve always liked looking at things relative to each other because I think that’s the only way you can see sort of the trends of alpha as opposed to just looking at what’s pure beta. But it was really, again, much more out of necessity.

Michael Gayed (50:05):
Thankfully that period is what kind of drove me to at least get to this point, pleading funds with the area, the anomaly that I’m most confident in having tested everything else imaginable.

Trey Lockerbie (50:17):
In your own personal portfolio, do you ever go into individual stocks or individual companies?

Michael Gayed (50:22):
I used to. I’m not a meme trader, I guess that is the way to say it. If you want to beat the market, you have to choose the right market, which is really an argument for asset allocation. So you always go back to the proven studies. [Berenson B. Barenhund 00:50:34] in the late ’80s, basically show that asset allocation is the key to everything. It’s not about the individual positions, it’s about the average of the position. I tend to not want to try to reinvent the wheel because I believe there’s much more I can do to uncover and make progress. So because the studies are pretty uniform on that point why should I do individual stocks.

Michael Gayed (50:53):
By the way, I will say on that note, I do write about individual stocks. I’m one of Seeking Alpha’s writers in addition to the Lead Lag Report, which is much more ETF and asset allocation oriented. I do that because the reality is a lot of people still like to talk stocks. I try to add some color, some interesting points about narratives, but as far as my own personal investment style, I would much rather be choosing the right average than choosing the individuals in the average.

Trey Lockerbie (51:16):
A fund that has so many different allocations across different asset classes. What do you choose as the benchmark if it’s not the S&P?

Michael Gayed (51:23):
This is the challenge. Because to your point, the turnover on all three funds, the ATAC rotation mutual fund, risk-on risk-off, RORO ETF, the JOJO junk-on junk-off bond ETF. The turnover on all the funds is expected to be well north of a thousand percent who are active. So I always laugh when people debate active versus passive because they overweight Apple by 50 basis points. It’s like, “Dude, that’s not active. That’s not active share.”

Michael Gayed (51:48):
They’re very active because the anomaly only lives in the short term. It goes back to mark for an efficient longer term, it’s in the short term where you can see the weather up to the horizon and you have to keep on slowing down. So because of that, you’re right. It’s very hard to benchmark because how can you benchmark something that’s that active. Unfortunately, most people will benchmark against the S&P, which I love in the years like last year in the midst of the COVID crash, but it’s not the right benchmark. And that’s an important point.

Michael Gayed (52:10):
I think the way to think about this stuff is you compare it against other tactical strategies, other active non-correlated or local related approaches, and you blend those up the competition basically and that’s your benchmark, right? It’s not something that you can really compare against a passive vehicle or passive index by any means.

Trey Lockerbie (52:26):
This is a bonus question, but to the best of your ability, do you think your approach has any similarities as something that, say, Jim Simons is doing?

Michael Gayed (52:35):
I am sure that certain indicators are parts of Simons and others when they do their hyperactive trading. I am certainly not smart enough to have as many variables, but I also think I’m probably fairly antifragile from that standpoint because I’m only focusing on one or two that define the bulk of why markets do what they do.

Trey Lockerbie (52:54):
Interesting. Well, this has been a really eye-opening conversation, Michael. I’ve really enjoyed it and really enjoyed your papers as well. I really recommend everyone to go read them and check out the Lead Lag Report. Before I let you go, I’m going to give you the opportunity to hand it off to our audience where they can learn more about you, where they can follow along, find all your research, et cetera.

Michael Gayed (53:13):
I appreciate that. So on Twitter, I’m almost as active as my funds through @leadlagreport. You can check out the funds at ATAC. ATAC just stands for a tactical, atacfunds.com. And then for the premium research, it’s leadlagreport.com. Everything is basically just variations of the same concept. Kill it on the stock market. You have to not get killed. You have to also be in the environments where you could be killed, which is those down periods.

Michael Gayed (53:37):
Look, at the end of the day, all I’m trying to do is give voice to math, and the stuff that I presented out there, it’s not magical. You can test it. You can see it’s valid. Go beyond the small sample, think longer-term, and realize the future, again is unknowable.

Trey Lockerbie (53:50):
Michael, this is fantastic. Thank you so much. Let’s do it again some time.

Michael Gayed (53:54):
I appreciate it. Thank you.

Trey Lockerbie (53:56):
All right, everybody. Hey, if you’re loving the show, please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app. Maybe even leave us a review. We’d love to hear from you. You can also find me on Twitter. That’s where Michael and I first connected @TreyLockerbie. And if you haven’t already done so, please go check out all the tools and resources we’ve built for you at theinvestorspodcast.com. Simply Google TIP Finance, and it will pop right up. And with that, we’ll see you again next time.

Outro (54:19):
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