2023 Economic and Investment Outlook Video: Lies, Damn Lies and Recessions

Will we have a recession? What does that mean for investors? Does a technical recession impact investment strategy, or is a recession just a statistical exercise?

In our 2023 Outlook, we discuss the economy, inflation, interest rates, and unemployment. We weigh the evidence for and against a recession in 2023. Then we get practical and discuss investment considerations for 2023. We cover the stock market, bond market and commodities. We wrap up with a long-term view on inflation and supply driven economics. In our view, better economy and immigration policy is required to prevent a repeat of the 1970s.

If you have questions about the implications for your personal investments, schedule a call here, we would be happy to answer questions and discuss further.

Transcript:

Hi everyone. Welcome to our 2023 Outlook. My name is Brian c and I'm the founding partner of Capital Stewards. We are professional investors who help other professionals make smart long-term investing and financial planning decisions. Today I'm gonna share our views on the economy and markets as we head into 2023 and more importantly, What you as an investor should be doing about the situation that we find ourselves in.

We titled this year's Outlook to poke Fun a little bit at the mechanics of determining whether or not we're in the recession. As we'll discuss a little bit later, the processes have been arbitrary and the investment implications for a small recession scenario versus a very little gross scenario. R Indeed, pretty similar.

First I think it's important that we think back over 2022 and acknowledge that this has been a really challenging period for investors all around the world. We've seen lots of volatility. It's not an unprecedented decline, but certainly more than we've experienced in recent years. And we do think this is a turning point in the global economy as we move forward into the 20.

When we're in periods of significant regime change in transition, assuming that anyone's including ours, crystal Paul, of forward looking predictions is not smart most in fact will be wrong. So a couple of examples for 2022, Goldman Sachs predicted at least 3 25 basis point interest rate hikes and 6.25% equity.

That's not what we saw. The JP Morgan private bank liked equities more than bonds. Bonds more than cash. That was exactly backwards. For our own efforts, we suggested overweighting value stocks favoring corporate and high yield bonds over treasuries, reducing bond exposure in favor of alternative assets like commodities, infrastructure.

Most of that turned out to be okay. We were also bullish on Europe, which turned out to be wrong really quickly as Russia innovated Ukraine early in February.

I make that point not to cast disparity on forecasters, but to point out what's most important is building a long term investment strategy. That one accomplishes your goals across all kinds of markets, both positive and. And two, a strategy that you can stick with through challenging periods. Those two factors alone far outweigh getting the forecast for any given year, right or wrong.

As you'll hear us say, successful investing is about setting goals and then building diversified investment portfolios to accomplish those goals over long periods of time with a high degree of confidence. There's no secret sauce. There's no secret about 2023 that's held by a small group of people that outweighs good long term investment philosophy.

So as always, since we're long term investors, we start looking at next year by looking at long term returns and assessing where we really are. We don't wanna get caught up in short term thinking that can cloud our judgment. Looking long term, the s and p 500 is earning just over 9% on average. Over about the last 25 years.

I think during downturns it's especially important to look at prior peak to trough declines versus today, for example, even if you had invested in stocks on this page, which are the red, is the red line um, or bonds for that matter, the green line at the height of the tech bubble, or right before the great financial crisis, or right before the Covid crash in 2020, you would still be a happy investor today.

You would likely. Uh, Long-term investment goals that are on track. And so it's important to have, as I mentioned before, a good long-term investment plan and to keep a long-term perspective of of where we are. Right. If we zoom in just slightly to the last decade, you still likely experience significant stock market returns even after this year's downturn.

Stock markets are above their pre covid peaks. Over the last decade, stocks have been the best performing asset class followed by real estate. And that's even more so if that real estate's bought with debt, which is true in a lot of cases, especially when you think about your house. Bonds and gold have slightly underperformed inflation.

We saw a really historic rise in stock markets globally after the pandemic. And so some of that is now reverting back towards longer term averages. But as a long term investor, your portfolio is likely benefited from the rise in prior years, and we've given some of that back this year, certainly.

But even after the downturn in 2022, stock markets have returned. More than uh, 13% a year over the last decade. That's well above historical averages and well above what you should be using when you build long term investment plans. So your long term goals that they were well planned should be on track even with all the challenges that we've seen in 2022.

And if you're not sure about that or if you have concerns, and I would recommend talking to a professional like us or somebody else that you trust to build a solid long-term plan. All right, so now I know everybody wants to talk about 2023. So we'll dive into that a little bit as we expect it in our 2022 forecast titled, rising Rates Will Impact Everything.

Rates have Risen this year across all points of the yield curve. The 10 year treasury bond yield, which can be thought of as sort of the medium term risk free rate and the required return of investors before they think about anything else. That's more than doubled from one and a half percent to three and a half percent.

And you see the red line moving up to the teal. On the, on the chart that's caused the prices of many assets, including stocks and bonds to fall during 2020. However we're starting to reach a more stable point on the yield curve, and you see that the re the excuse me, the gold line has kind of moved it down a little bit to that teal line.

So we're starting to, to stabilize and see rates begin to normalize. However, we don't think we're out of the woods yet in that process.

Headline inflation will continue to decline as we head into 2023 as energy prices, food, cars, and other key contributors to this year's inflation start to stabilize. But moving down from 8% inflation to 5% inflation doesn't mean that all is well. And the feds just going to relent on its rate hiking cycle, and call it mission.

Um, In our view, the labor market remains really strong and that plus continuous contributions from housing will cost core inflation to remain stubbornly high in 2023. And you may say, well, wait a minute. I see house prices around me going down. The way that the consumer price index measures housing creates a lag.

We have seen evidence of home prices following and new rental leases while they're up year over. Um, They're going down from their peak over the summer, so we've seen that activity starting to turn around, but it's gonna take another six or eight months for that to be reflected in the CPI that gets reported in the media.

So altogether it's gonna be challenging for the Fed to get back to its longer term inflation target. We don't believe the market fully appreciates how long it's gonna take for that inflation target to be reached. In the summer of 2022, market participants in the Fed didn't believe that rates would need to rise more than three to 4%.

We were skeptical and rightly so of that view. Back then, and you can see in the chart on the left hand side, now expectations for peak fed fund rates are closing in on 5%. But the markets are expecting the fed to cut rates in 2023. So the market's saying, Hey, there's gonna be a recession. The fed's gonna react to that, and they're gonna cut rates.

And we disagree with that. Some of the Fed members share that sentiment as well. But both of those camps have been wrong so far in the cycle for core inflation to fall significantly, which needs to happen prior to rate cuts. The em, the employment situation and the unemployment situation, they.

Change in a material way. We've gotta see slack happening in the labor market, and this may be my favorite chart from the last 18 months. And all I had to do this time to update it was just add the dot, dot, dot and the still. As you can see, the rate hikes have started to flatten out the gap between job openings, which are the red line and the available workers, which are the yellow line, but that gap remains really large.

Tech firms started layoffs over the summer. You've seen that in the news. We talked about that last quarter recently, Pepsi announced that it's laying off hundreds of people. Pepsi has 300,000 employees around the world, so a few hundred layoffs aren't gonna move the needle that much. The concept of labor hoarding, I think is being discussed now by a lot of larger firms that struggle to get workers back after the pandemic.

Many of those firms still haven't met their post pandemic staffing requirements if you've been to a hotel lately. Right. Especially in the services industry. This is true. And so they may be willing to have slightly lower margins going into a recession in order to keep the talent based longer term.

We heard similar sentiment from bank executives at conferences earlier in the week. So while the labor market is moving in the right direction, it's gonna take a while for it to fully normalizing it back to the environment we were in for such a long time. Which is where we had more people looking for jobs than jobs that were available.

So that kind of brings us to the crystal ball section. Will we or won't we have a recession in 2022? First it's kind of level set that a recession is not two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Everybody talks about that. You'll hear that in the. That happened earlier this year and it was not a recession.

So anybody that tells you that a recession happens every time we have two consecutive quarters of negative gdp, growth is wrong. recession is identified and called by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Consistent negative GDP is a major factor in their determination process for deciding if there's a recession.

And they look at two negative quarters of GDP growth as an input to that. But also they look at unemployment, slowing, economic activity spending, and a bunch of other factors. And so negative GDP earlier this year was caused by shifts in inventories changes in the import and export balance. And that was a lot of economic noise.

That was the result of the process of normalizing from covid and it wasn't representative of an actual slowdown. And so therefore, we didn't have an actual recess. So let's look at next year and I'll talk about a few data points that make the case for a recession. And a few that make the case for the opposite, which is that we have a soft landing.

So first up is leading indicators of economic activity. Things like manufacturing, orders for consumer goods and building permits along with investment markets. Now they're clearly in negative territory. You can see on the chart the, the gold area there. Those, you know, those have been declining for some time and now they're, they're certainly in negative territory and historically and with rare, and frankly, less negative exceptions than what we see now.

These leading indicators from the conference board have indicated that a recession is coming with a pretty high you know, confidence level. So, so, Case one for a recession. Next is interest rates. As I discussed earlier, the labor market is not slowing as quickly perhaps as the Fed might like.

And that's likely because rates have increased, but they haven't increased above the level of core inflation. We've talked a lot about this in the past. Historically, the Fed has had to raise rates, which are represented by the red line above the level of core inflation on this chart, which is the green line to cool.

I. Um, There are no exceptions of this logic in modern history. This, you know, when you look back over time, you always see the Fed fund rate going above the core inflation level in order to stamp out inflation. So that argues that higher rates either are immediately in our future in order to continue to cool inflation or rates are gonna remain elevated as inflation falls below the Fed funds rate.

And we're not gonna get those rate cuts in the second half of the year. So, significant increases in rates from here, that's gonna, that would accelerate the pace of the economic slowdown and increased the likelihood of a. So on the other side is a recession guaranteed. Overall economic activity is slowing as illustrated by the ISM surveys.

That's the Institute of Supply Management. They survey companies and ask about things like manufacturing activity, new orders, inventory sales, all those kinds of things. However, some of that, particularly in the goods side of things, is probably a healthy return to normal from post covid, you can see the service.

Survey in green, that's still showing signs of growth. It's gonna be really difficult for the economy to have a recession while services is growing because services make up such a large percentage of the economy. It's also worth noting, if you look at the ISM, reading at least where it stands today.

There have been many times when it's at the, the current level and we haven't seen a recession. If you look back over history, right? The consumer continues to be resilient. That's case number two. Spending continues to grow, especially at service oriented businesses. Spending on goods is normalizing. And that's especially on an inflation adjusted basis, right?

If you've got 8% inflation, then retail sales at 8% sort of implies that retail sales are sort of flat year over year. . But the, the run up that happened in in good spending during the pandemic was never expected to be sustainable over the long term. Right? The best real time data on the consumer comes from banks as they can see transaction activity in real time.

So year to date payments at bank of America. The, the payment activity is up 11% year over year, but it's only up 5% from October to November. So the growth rate is slowing, so more activity, but it's starting to slow down. And, and again, I think it's notable to, to think that that 11% spike included some covid normalization.

So we expect to see. Things normalize a little bit. The current levels are more consistent with a 2% pre covid slow growth economy. So that's not a recession. Black Friday spending was also down from a year ago. But again, still consistent with what we saw historically. So last year was kind of an anomaly.

Deposit balances and debt balances have been discussed a lot in the news. And, and that's as consumers reduce the deposit balances that they held during covid and they start to take on more debt you know, how does that impact their spending? The rate of change is really slow. And again, something that we expected to see as the economy normalized.

JP Morgan Chase, they study the, the consumer and, and they think about it, I think in a, a really effective way. And that's looking at the days of operating expenses that customers. On hand in their checking account and comparing that over periods of time, particularly now versus pre pandemic. And so consumers that make less than $50,000 a year are about halfway back to where they were before the pandemic.

So that means they still have excess deposits. Despite all of the inflation that's going on. According to JP Morgan's projections, if you advance the decline in deposits that they're seeing forward, kind of at the same rate of time, those, those consumers in the less than $50,000 annual earnings bucket, are not gonna even normalize the pre pandemic levels until the middle of next year.

So, to be Q3 before they even have less money in the bank than they did before, the. Which was a time when we had a strong consumer and a strong economy so higher income consumers, they're in, in an even better place. So it's gonna take a pretty significant change in unemployment to actually weaken the consumer balance sheets rapidly enough to create a real drop in spending.

The next page is looking at the housing market. So the N A H B Wells Fargo Housing Market Index tracks the sentiment and the activity of new home builders, and that's important because home construction is a key part of the economy. Prices on your existing house are also important. But the sale of an existing home doesn't contribute to the economy the same way that all the construction activity around building a new home does.

The index shows that activity is currently at levels only matched by the covid shutdown when no one was able to go look at homes or build homes. The housing crisis in the savings alone crisis from the 1990s. The demand for new housing continues to be really strong. Single family homes, as we've talked about before, were under produced for more than a decade plus.

Both buyers as that we just talked about. Builders are much better capitalized this time around than they were in the, the two sort of financial oriented crisis that happen when we saw activity slope before. So given all of that, it seems. That activity continues to slow much more going into next year perhaps home construction stabilizes and other parts of the economy struggle in 2023, and that kind of gives it a little bit of buoyancy for overall gdp.

Now turning back to the strong labor market we've never had a recession without a significant increase in unemployment in the modern era going back to the 1950s. So for rate hikes to cause a recession, the gap between open jobs and existing workers must disappear. And unemployment would have to rise once that happens by several million workers.

That could well happen towards the end of next. It seems like it's not gonna happen short term because we just have to have so much change happen in a pretty short period of time for a recession to happen, say in the first quarter of next year. So it seems like that change is gonna take a while to materialize.

It's also noteworthy though that employment tends to be a lagging indicator. So we expect it to move last and not before we get into a recession. So if we do get into a recession in the second half of next year, you could then start to see employment start to drag down. So as you can see, there's strong evidence that we're going into a recession and there's strong evidence that we may have a rare soft landing.

The economy needs to slow down. That's intentional. That's a feature, not a bug of fed rate hikes. But it is slowing from a really high post covid bounce back levels. , what we can say for sure headed into 2023. Rising rates will cause the economy to continue to slow. I would argue whether we have a slight recession or just really slow growth the implications for investors is the same.

So we can let the economists and the statisticians debate about whether or not we're actually in a technical recession. What's not open for debate is that the economy, particularly in the United States, is continuing to slow down. So let's turn to the implications for investors as we go into 2020. We'll start with stocks, and that's probably the number one question I get.

The equity market has never bottomed before a recession in modern history. And if we're not in a recession currently, which the Atlanta Fed G d P Tracker suggests that q4 is gonna show pretty moderately positive economic growth, then the equity market may still have further to fall before all that excess liquidity is truly drained out of the system.

But it is important to know that stocks start to. Before the end of a hard time. So if you're thinking, I'll wait till, you know, the end of next year when the world feels like it's in a better place to start investing again, you might be missing out on the best return opportunities because those, those happen when things feel particularly crappy.

So, To further illustrate the point, let's talk a little bit about s and p earnings and valuations. So, earnings missed expectations in the third quarter growing only 2%. In fact though, if you exclude energy companies that benefited from the unique shock and oil prices that happen because of the Ukraine conflict if you exclude those companies, then earnings actually fell in the third quarter, five and a half.

Um, Yet expectations show that earnings are gonna grow in 2023 despite all the headwinds and the macro backdrop that we just talked about. So I don't think that's a pretty picture. Revenues were higher. So the miss in the third quarter was on higher expenses and lower margins due to inflation. It's more expensive to.

Buy all those raw materials, Marshman said, to hire people, et cetera. And the inability for companies to continue to raise price, right? So early in the year, we saw companies just raise price to make up for those increased costs. At some point, they're not able to do that anymore, and we started to see that in the third quarter.

All. Margins were elevated during this period of post covid demand that we had right last year with the economy was really, really strong. If we just get margins that revert back to, to 2019 to normal economic levels that aren't part of a bounce back from Covid, that suggests roughly a 10% decline in earnings for 2023.

So right now we're pricing in growth. If we just get normalized margins, that's gonna suggest a decline in earnings in 2023. On the right hand side of the page, you'll see the PE ratio. That we attach the corporate earnings to determine what we should pay for the shares of stock. The s and p's currently trading around 17 times earnings.

That's not expensive. But it's also not on sale. We had lower valuations earlier in the fall, so if earnings fall further that multiple looks even worse, maybe 18 or 19 times. And and certainly has implications for then how we think about investing. And, and one more thing to just drill this point home valuation.

So especially when we look at the, the forward looking price to earnings ratio that's one of the most predictive indicators of long term stock returns as a refresher. The PE ratio is one way to think about the value that we receive when we buy a stock. If you look at the chart you'll see a tight cluster of green dots around the middle of the page.

Each of those dots is the s and p 500 in return over a 10 year time period. The tight clustering means that the returns have a, a high relative correlation with PE ratios. So high correlation good predictability. In other words, the Ford PE ratio. A good indicator of future returns over a 10 year time period.

You'll also notice the gold dots which are all over the board. This is one year return. So while a PE ratio does a good job of explaining long term returns, it's very difficult to predict short term investment returns. So as I always say, you have long term goals. We can use data to make long-term investment decisions.

We can't do that as well on a six or 12 month time. Currently the PE ratio is uh, 17.7 or 17 times earnings as we just talked about on the last page. So historically, that implies about a 5% return in stocks over the next 10 years, so slightly below average. So we talked a little bit about stocks.

Now let's shift over to the bond side of the portfolio. We manage portfolios in two primary buckets equity and then diversification and fixed income, which is the stuff that diversifies away. Some of the risk associated with investing in stocks. So on the fixed income side of the portfolio, 2022 was all about avoiding exposure to rising rates.

We used commodities, real assets, infrastructure as alternatives to bonds. You can see in the chart commodities. An oil in particular in this illustration performed well. During sharp, unanticipated rises of inflation that occurred particularly at the end of last year in the first half of 2022 uh, well we think rates are gonna go slightly higher.

The difference between the peak and today's rates is much, much smaller than we were a year ago. So calling the peak in rates is like picking a stock market bottom. It's fraught with opportunity for you to make painful errors. Thus, it's time to start moving. From commodities and other diversifier back into more traditional fixed income as rates close in on their peak.

And one note on oil, since we're talking about commodities we are long-term investors, so shifting assets back into bonds doesn't mean that we think the current oil price is too high or too low.

It's not really a call on the, the, the training dynamics of the oil market we think oil will be more range-bound and it will become more of a training asset on short term supply and demand fundamentals going. Also, it's difficult to predict some of the geopolitical events that may have big impacts on oil and other commodity prices going forward, since we aren't looking for an inflation shock anymore.

Oil and other commodities just become less valuable to us as pieces of the portfolio. So there's plenty of folks that are really good at trading oil around the world and that's not something that we have and expertise in. And so we use them in the right places to help hedge against inflation.

And then we move away from those into other types of. Um, And I think it's always important to know when we talk about oil, the world has plenty of oil and other commodities. So it can go a long, long time with flat or down prices. So you really need something like an inflation shock to drive the price of oil significantly higher and make it an attractive asset from an investment standpoint.

Um, So in fixed income, when we think about how we manage core bond portfolios that means starting to shift into bonds that mature further out on the curve. Again, we're not trying to call the, the top of the rate market as we move from. Overweight, shorter term, fixed didn come back to a more neutral positioning.

That happens over time. It can happen over the course of the year. So that means moving from two to three years in, from a maturity perspective out to six to 10 years. Again we're not trying to call the top. So that shift needs to happen slowly over time. Now that rates are higher. Future rate increases also have, have less of an impact on prices.

So there's actually some natural risk management built in there compared to where we were a year ago. In addition to building traditional fixed income into portfolios we're tracking emerging market debt closely. The data of emerging market countries underperformed this year as the dollar rose to record levels as the dollar falls.

And that reverses, we would expect emerging market debt to outperform, assuming that we don't have a significant recession that creates other credit problems around the. You can see in the charts the significant increase in the dollar relative to emerging market currencies on the left and the subsequent increases in interest rates for emerging market debt on the right.

So we expect that to start to reverse as we move into 2023. Uh, The shift in the US dollar should also help emerging market stocks. Emerging markets are more exposed to energy and commodities, and they benefit from stronger fundamentals and some of the low investment CapEx that we've seen in that space going forward.

It's also possible to produce energy and commodities at lower price points than in the us So the outlook in the US might be. Than in an emerging market country at a given oil price. Emerging markets indices do include China but other markets also have exposure to China in a, in a really significant way.

When we talk about emerging markets and, and the reopening, there may be a bumpy road. It's gonna be fits and starts and opening and closing. But on the whole, we see the Chinese economy reopening over the course of the year and being more open a year from now than they are certainly today. We continue to follow the geopolitical developments that are happening there really carefully.

In my view, president G uh, In my view, president, she is going to act in his best interest. He's shown that over the course of his time as president of the country and as chairman of the Communist Party. So if we think he's gonna act in his best interest, it would not be served. His interest would not be served by invading Taiwan in the moment.

So I think the situation evolves more sort of chest beating than another actual conflict around the world. China needs to return its economy to growth in order for the sort of communist miracle story to work for the government. That compromise has always been let us be in control and we'll make you better off.

And you can kind of ignore all the things that we do that you don't like. So achieving that objective of economic growth must be their primary focus. They've gotta get out of the covid lockdowns and get the economy going again. And so we think that's good news for emerging markets and for the global economy as a.

I wanted to in conclude this year's outlook with a discussion of the US labor force. As you have probably heard in the media, the labor force is not fully recovered from Covid. You can see this illustrated in the labor force chart that's on the left hand side of the page which is down more than 2% from pre covid levels.

During Covid there were 2.6 million excess retirees. There's another 2 million people or so that are not working due to what we call long covid. So that's a 4 million worker gap in the labor force. And that's going to continue to trend down over time as baby boomers age outta the workforce.

It's also notable, you can see, even if you take the pre-code average out and just look at the peak of the labor force earlier in the, in this century were down significantly from those levels. And you can see that the workforce in the labor force has risen substantially over the last half of the 20th century to produce the economic growth that we saw in the United States.

So, If we don't solve this problem inflation is going to persist. And when we think about this scenario where we move to an environment that's much like the 1970s, this is how that happens. We have a restriction on the ability to supply the labor that the economy needs to continue to grow.

The economy tries to keep growing. Right on the right hand side of the, the charts, you see the economy in the green. It continued to grow. So even though the labor force has kind of been on pause, the economy has continued to grow. And so if we don't solve the problem inflation's gonna persist.

We're gonna move to a supply side driven regime. That's much like the 1970s. There's only a couple solutions for that, immigration or new babies. That's the only way that we get more workers. The US issued 280,000 green carts in the fiscal year, 2021 through 2020. That's obviously not enough to cover the gap.

Illegal immigration obviously much talked about in the news. That was a record, probably 2.7 million that we know about up more than a million from fiscal year 2021. We can pretend those folks don't work, but we know that's not true. For the most part. They come here to work to improve their prospects in life.

The issues that they can only work in certain industries where their status is less likely to. Discovered think restaurants, food production, construction, hospitality, all have higher percentages of undocumented workers. So the only other option if we're not gonna have more legal immigration is to have more babies.

But the US population is having 400,000 fewer babies every year than we were a decade ago. So it seems to us that the only way to solve this conundrum is through more legal immigration. More legal immigration should supplement the labor force. It's a good thing for the us, one of the wealthiest countries in the world to welcome refugees, to welcome marginalized folks from all over the world that want to come and contribute to ours.

Society and work. Creating a process for that to happen legally ensures that we find folks that wanna work hard, they wanna be contributors to our society. They wanna become part of our culture. And not people that want to detract from the US that just kind of come in you know, across the border illegally.

So that should be at the top of the political agenda for the next Congress because I think if we don't solve this problem then we're, we're in for a more challenging decade ahead. So what should we actually do at, at the end of these, we always try to make a few tactical recommendations that you can take and, and implement in your portfolio.

So the first is to start reinvesting in stocks and bonds if you're holding excess cash. We know from looking across markets that most investors are holding more cash now than they were historically it's time to start to reinvest in your long term investment plan. Secondly, don't try to pick the top of the interest rate.

Market or the bottom of the stock market. That's a really, really challenging thing to do. You heard earlier forecast, even from a, a large firm that have lots of economists and lots of analysts that are looking at these markets every, every day. It's very difficult for them to do that. It's challenging for any investor to accurately . Predict the top of the market or the bottom of the market. So average in over time. And then the third thing that's practical is consider diversification outside the United States. As we go through 2023 and also over the long term we expect some global opportunities to be perhaps more attractive than what we see in the us.

So we do each of these activities every. Um, On behalf of our clients. If you're not sure what to do with all the stuff that we talked about it's really easy to schedule a call to get real professional guidance. There's a link in the video notes. There's also a link to the top right hand page on our website.

You can find a time there that works. There's no sales pitch in those calls. We won't even let you sign up to work with us if you ask us. That would be weird cuz we just met on a phone call. In an intro call, we just ask a bunch of questions we wanna get to know. You wanna get to know your situ. Um, And then if we both feel like there's a fit we'll reconvene and, and have a formal proposal on how we can help you in your particular situation.

Why do people love working with us? First it starts with being good stewards of capital. We believe that we've all been entrusted with the resources and the capital that we have for for our families and to, to see our objectives and goals. Achieved both personally and philanthropically in the world around us.

And guiding our clients to steward their capital well is at the center of everything that we do as a firm. We believe that you should be in control of your money and not be controlled by it. If you don't make intentional decisions about what you're doing around your investments or other areas of your financial life, then your money's gonna be in the driver's seat and not you, and not the things you're called to and not the things that ultimately bring you fulfillment.

We think that quality financial advice should be easy to. Um, But yet you should still have personalized guidance. You don't have to choose between a robot advisor or somebody online. You can get really good personalized guidance from a person and also have really great digital tools at your, at, at your disposal.

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You should understand your portfolio and how all the tools that we're employing are helping you to achieve your goals. So that's a little bit of a snapshot for why folks love working with us. If you're looking for help with your in investments we'd be happy to guide you to achieving your investment goals.

And with that, I wish you all very best for 2023 and we look forward to seeing and talking to you soon. Bye-bye.