Protecting and Growing Your Wealth Amid Tariff Turbulence: April 10, 2025 Webinar

All right, folks, thanks for everybody for joining us today here, um, for our webinar, Protecting and Growing Your Wealth Amid Tariff Turbulence. My name is Brian Dress. For those of you who don't know me, um, I'm the Director of Research here at Left Brain and also a wealth Management Advisor. We're going to speak about kind of what everybody— what's on everybody's mind right now, which is volatility in the markets that has kicked up over the last 6 to 8 weeks. We kind of all know what the headlines are. It's a lot around the tariff talk and we're starting to hear whispers of recession from market participants all around Wall Street. So we wanted to get everyone together and discuss with you our thoughts We know there's a lot in the media that's bandied about and it doesn't really necessarily have much to do with what we're doing here at Left Brain. So we wanted to get everyone together so we could discuss with you what we're doing and what our thoughts are on what's going— what we're going to see going forward. We've got a lot to cover today. So the first thing is we're going to discuss just what's happening in the marketplace. Obviously, a lot of— a lot has changed in Washington and in the markets. Specifically since Election Day and even more so since February 9th, February 14th, which was the peak of the market. So we're going to talk about what's happening. No one's going to give you his thoughts. Once that is completed, we're going to talk to you why we remain bullish overall about a number of different investment opportunities. And Nolan's going to give you his thoughts on that. There are particular opportunities in the market, you know, when we have down periods in the market. Almost everything goes on sale. That means that the bad merchandise and the good merchandise, the best stocks go on sale. So we'll talk to you about some of the opportunities that we're seeing in the current situation. We'll also give you some actions that you can take now to take advantage of the situation. When we have, you know, down markets, there are always things that you can do with your portfolio to take advantage of changes in the market. And we'll talk about a little bit of that. And finally, we'll finish it up with Q&A. So I'm going to bring in our CEO and Chief Investment Officer, Nolan Langford. Nolan, I'm just going to give you a minute or two just to give you kind of level set for folks, and then we'll jump right into the presentation from there.

So let's start on just talking about kind of the update and what's been happening. So I would say it's been so far a tale of two times. So we had the election night Donald Trump victory, and we had the markets really, uh, saluting that victory, and markets were really excited. And we got what we call a Trump bump. I think the markets were excited about the prospect of deregulation, lower taxes, a more business-friendly government. And the market stayed excited for about 3 months, right until Valentine's Day. And Valentine's Day in the market, something changed pretty dramatically where the market sort of put on the brakes. And I think it had a lot to do obviously with this tariff talk. I think one of the things that confused people is the Donald Trump that they voted in turned out to be a little bit different than the Donald Trump that, that they got when he got into the White House. I don't think many people saw this kind of tariff fight coming, particularly not this aggressive, not being this aggressive right off the bat. And so I think that is really kind of confusing people. And now that we do have the tariff talk, people need to figure out kind of what the secondary effects of the tariff might be. And that's what you're seeing in the market right now. You're seeing a lot of volatility. There's a lot of confusion, a lot of uncertainty, and obviously you're seeing a lot of concern. So that's sort of the backdrop for where we are now.

So, Nolan, can you just describe the volatility we've been seeing the last couple of months? So obviously we, you know, most of us follow the stock market closely and there's been volatility there the last 6 or 8 weeks. But then something new happened, which was the bond market volatility over the last few days. Can you just give us a quick update on what we're seeing from that standpoint?

You're right, Brian. We've seen a lot of volatility. You know, it first started, as I mentioned, kind of mid-February where we kind of had this rolling bear market, but it wasn't very noticeable. It first started in the high momentum, high beta stocks, stocks that had gone up the most. Over the prior several months started coming down first. That happened in mid-February, but a lot of the other areas of the market really were holding up fairly well. But then the bear market started to— or at least the sell-off really started to rotate into other areas of the stock market. Eventually got to oil, utilities, consumer staples, which had held up initially, and then finally over to the bond market. So we don't really know the cause of it, But it looks like typical bear market action. Could be a liquidity issue. Uh, it could be some funds liquidating. Um, there's a lot of theories, but we really don't know. What we do know is that activity is not indicative of a strong market or a bull market. That just means there's stress in the market or stress in the system. And it's typical. I remember during COVID we seen this, uh, quite a bit. And I've also during the Great Financial Crisis, you have to go back a ways, but It's always a little concerning when you see it, but, you know, I think a lot of it had to do with what's happening in Washington, sort of the uncertainty and people not really knowing, everybody looking for a safe place to invest. And you saw that a little bit even in the gold market. Okay.

So kind of the elephant in the room or what we really need to discuss is what's going on with tariffs. It's been a politically polarizing time over the last 6 months, Nolan. So we want to try to be neutral from that perspective. But, you know, obviously being You know, being true to what we see in terms of tariffs. Talk about how we manage things for clients, you know, based on the economics of the situation, not the politics. And then what are your thoughts about what we're seeing in sort of this tariff push-pull?

So let's start with the tariff push-pull. We can only fear— I mean, we cannot— we can take the president and this administration at their word. And I think that the view on Washington is a lot of these countries have gotten a really good deal from the US for a very long time. So if you think about most of these trade policies, most of them were put in post-World War II to try to help the rest of the world rebuild. And a lot of these policies kind of were never revisited. And so if you look at it, a lot of goods that are sold overseas, at least our goods, are hit with a higher tariff. Than that country's goods coming into our country. And I think the, the president feels that the trade deficit is kind of what has put us in a, in a hole with more borrowing. And he sees this as a way to kind of reset trade. And I think therein lies the, the issue. There's a lot of uncertainty. We've never remade global trade before, at least not on this scale. And that's where a lot of the uncertainty comes in. As far as the politics go, we're not a political shop here. We think we've had just as many Republican mistakes as we've had Democratic mistakes. And if you look at the trade deficit over the decades, it's grown equally as fast no matter who is in the White House. So really what we are as investors and we try to parse out the landscape to determine the winners versus the losers, to find a way that we can make clients money. Okay, perfect.

And I want to just talk about two quick things dovetailing off what you mentioned. So the chart that we see on the screen here, just the US national debt, which has, you know, increased exponentially pretty much since the great financial crisis of '07 to '09. And then we have historical tax rates. So we can see here, Nolan, historical tax rates. You know, it always feels like we pay too much in taxes, but historically speaking, we're at a pretty low ebb in terms of taxes. So How do we incorporate these two factors into what you see in terms of the market and how that's playing out into things right now?

Well, you're right, taxes are low. And if you look at the other chart, which was our national debt, you know, one of the ways that you see— I mean, there's two things you need to do for the debt. One of them is you need to cut spending. I mean, you have to— we're running a budget deficit. The economy is really strong right now. Just for people who are listening, we're talking about maybe we do have a slowdown. Maybe we will have one in the future, but right now the economy is really strong. We just had a GDP print that was good and we had a CPI, an inflation print that was also good. The job market is still fairly strong. We have low unemployment and we still have excess spending. We spend about $1.5 trillion more than we take in in tax receipts. And, and that's a problem. Taxes historically has been a way to solve that problem. You raise taxes. Now, so far, this trade talk and these tariffs are raising taxes. Now, you're not raising income taxes when people fill out their 1040, but you're certainly raising taxes. And when people go to the store and they pay higher prices for goods, tariffs are just another tax. They're going to get passed through to the consumer, and the consumer is going to be squalled more, but they will raise more government revenues. And with those increasing government revenues, the deficit will be cut.

Let's talk about what we're doing to deal with the situation or to respond to the situation. So I guess first question a lot of people are wondering, so uncertainty is, is normal in markets. I know historically, if you look back over the decades, there's been a lot of these kind of corrections, recessions and things like that. I know the last 20 years it feels like there's probably been fewer than normal. So a lot of people are asking, are we in a recession? Is it a correction? Is it a bear market?

I don't think they've been coming less frequently, Brian. It seems like they've been coming with greater frequency. Remember in 2022, we just had a bear market of both stocks and bonds. And during COVID um, now that one didn't last very long, right? That's within the last 5 years we've had 3 of them. You know, unfortunately, this one a lot of people would say is an unforced error. This one was kind of manufactured, um, So that's kind of unfortunate. But you're right, just as part of the normal economic cycle, we get recessions and we get bear markets. And that's just part of the capitalistic free market society. There's no way to— you get excesses that built up and build up in the system. They come crashing down, things reset, and you kind of build from there. This one's a little bit different. Like I mentioned, the underlying fundamentals in our economy right now are really strong. Yes, we do have a slowdown that will likely happen. But that's pretty much because people are going to be more conservative because they don't know what's going to come in the future because of the tariffs. But people are working. Savings rates still high. Interest rates are high, but we're dealing with them. And so our economy is strong right now and it's resilient. We'll see what happens going forward. But if we are headed toward a recession, Hopefully it'll be— it looks like it might be priced in already. And depending on what policies the government takes, we could course correct. So it's not a foregone conclusion that we're headed toward a recession. We just know it's a slowdown at this point.

Okay, then, Nolan. And with that being said, we know with the slowdown, certainly different types of investments are going to profit from that than when we're in more of a rip-roaring bull market sort of situation. So I think we want to spend the most time on this. And this is something that people are looking for. They look to us for guidance and advice on how to manage these sort of situations in the market. Can you talk to us a little bit about, you know, we made some changes in client portfolios over the last few days. Talk to me first about why we did that and then talk a little bit. And from a general perspective, what sort of changes we're making and you know, how we think those sort of changes fit into a long-term strategy for our clients.

So as you know, as everybody's listening, no, we are active managers. So that means we kind of read the room. We pay attention to not only what's happening now, but what's likely to happen. And then we decide whether, A, we want more of something, B, we want to keep the same position, or C, we want less of it. And one of the things that we know with the tariffs is they're going to be a couple of sectors that are going to be disproportionately impacted. One of them is consumer, the consumer sector. So whatever you're counting on discretionary spending from the consumer, we know consumers are going to be more conservative and they're going to kind of pull back. The other thing that we know is in times of stress, people have tougher time paying their bills. So you get credit losses and defaults that go up. That's part of one of the reasons Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase issued his annual letter and it was pretty gloomy. You know, he's in the banking sector, so he has to be conservative because he sees losses first. And so for us, looking at client portfolios, those two areas we want to be really careful about. So the consumer— so if you take a look, some consumer names that looked like they were, uh, probably going to have a tough time going forward, we moved to more defensive, uh, consumer names. And then the same thing with financials. So, you know, Apollo— we don't really have much in the banks, there was a couple of financials that we had. Apollo's one that comes to mind that we wanted to move to. Interactive Brokers is another. We wanted to move to something that was a little less exposed to credit losses. And so we could keep the exposure, but also keep the volatility down.

Okay, and now with that being said, you know, money has to move from something, has to move to something. So just give a quick free, you know, quick thought or quick, sketch of what we're doing instead of some of the things that we've moved away from?

Yeah, so sure. So a couple of areas that we do like is insurance. So I mentioned Apollo earlier, and Apollo is a financial firm. It actually does mergers and acquisitions with other businesses, and they're also involved in non-secured, non-bank lending. So it is economically exposed. So areas that we do like are things like insurance. Chubb is a company that does property and casualty insurance. Really is not economically sensitive. People are going to get and pay their insurance bill no matter what happens in the economy. So that's an area we're a lot more comfortable with. Monster, which is a beverage business, it's a consumer staple at the grocery store, something a little bit more comfortable with. Dollar General. There's a lot that we think the consumer is going to be impacted. The consumer is not going to stop spending, but they will trade down. So a couple of areas we like, for example, Dollar General and the dollar stores. Walmart is an area that we have exposure to. And then Waste Management, which is the big trash recycling business. No matter what happens, people are going to still get their trash taken out and they're still going to recycle. So those are some of the areas that we do like. And then we have moved and parked some money more conservatively into some Treasury holdings for the time being, just so we get a better understanding of what's likely to do well going forward. And right now we're in earnings season. Actually kicks off tomorrow with the banks. And then over the next 3 weeks, we'll have the earnings rolling in fast and furious and we'll get a really good idea up close and personal how CEOs are responding to this and which industries and businesses are prospering.

Okay, Nolan, we'll get into a little bit more about strategy moving forward a little bit further down the roster here. But I did want to quickly ask I know when we make changes in portfolios, one of the things that people are concerned about is capital gains. So can you just quickly speak to how we manage the capital gains of kind of the moves we made in the last few days?

Yeah, fortunately it looks like for the stuff that we made in taxable accounts, it looks like for the most part it was a wash. So if we did have capital gains, it looks like the offsetting capital losses about sanitize them again for each client. We look at them. This is just on a macro, on a whole. It's not speaking to any individual person's account. And again, we go through each account during the fourth quarter before the year crystallizes. We do capital gain, capital loss harvesting to the extent we have taken any gain and we can reasonably bring it down with something that makes sense. We always look to do that in Q4.

Okay, thanks, Nolan. Let's move on to why we do remain bullish on the markets overall and remaining invested. So this is an important topic, Nolan, because, you know, for instance, yesterday we saw a huge up move in the market and, you know, we always caution people against trying to time the markets because in these kind of bearish sort of moments, you do see these huge moves higher. And if you miss those, you know, you're really going to dilute your, dilute your return. So I want to talk a little bit about what do we still like and why do we still like it. So first question for you, Noland, is AI. This is something we've been talking about for a long time here. AI, artificial intelligence and other strong business trends. Can you talk about some of the few strong business trends that we still like and we think are going to continue to play out no matter what happens from a tariff perspective?

Yeah, so you mentioned one, artificial intelligence. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. Cybersecurity is another area. Digital transformation is another. I'll give a little anecdote on AI or artificial intelligence. I, believe it or not, I'm back in school. I'm in a grad school program now, and we meet once a month. And we had— we met last night, and one of the ladies in the grad school group works for Gallup, the big company that does survey. And she mentioned that they would go to their clients and they would build these decks for corporations to help them be more efficient in their business. And these decks that they built, you know, was 40 to 60 slides. She said they used to take them about 40 hours to build these decks, but they used AI, built a template, and now they can do it with one person in about a handful of hours. And the deck is better. So it just makes these businesses much more, much more efficient. AI does. And because of that, you're going to continue to see spending in artificial intelligence. Businesses will have to. They'll have to spend because it makes them more efficient. They can spend money, but also they're afraid of the competition. You know, if you don't spend on artificial intelligence and your competitor does and they become more efficient, they can lower costs and do things cheaper, then you're at a competitive disadvantage. You may be out of business. So artificial intelligence is the biggest trend that we've seen since the internet. We're at an earlier stage and people will definitely spend to keep up. Another anecdote, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, was on this morning and there was a lot of talk after the Deepseek news coming out in January. That was the Chinese AI model where the Chinese were able to build a language model for a lot less than a lot of the US companies were spending. And that really is what started to spook people in the AI space and people got nervous. And I think people got it wrong. What they don't understand is when the cost of AI goes down, you're going to see more adoption, not less. And that's pretty much what Andy Jassy said from, uh, that runs Amazon Web Services. They cannot keep up with demand. So people that are selling these AI stocks— you know, NVIDIA is one of them, it's been subject to a huge correction— people are just wrong. They're just flat wrong. So That's one. The other one is cybersecurity that we talked about. With the onset of AI, the bad guys have more tools to be really bad and the attack services, they have more devices to be bad on and more ways to be bad. So the CEO of CrowdStrike was speaking just yesterday, actually speaking to that effect. And spending is up in cybersecurity. It is not down. It is mission critical. And it doesn't matter what's happening in the economy. People have to keep their data, keep their people and their networks safe. So those are areas we feel are very, very durable, and even through the cycle, we think those will be continuous prosperous places to invest.

Okay, Nolan. And then I know that obviously sometimes the urge is move on, sell when things get tough. As I mentioned before, that has not been a strategy that works over time. And I want you to just expand upon that a little bit and talk about how we're keeping that in mind as we look to manage portfolios through kind of a difficult time here, hopefully to move on to the other side and back to profitability.

Yeah, it's really difficult when things aren't going well to sell and then to get back. You have to sell at the right time and get back in at the right time. It just never works. You have to be right twice. And I think what people need to remember is when you own shares and when you own stocks, the deck is really stacked in your favor. I don't think a lot of people really understand that. First, you have the CEO of whatever business you own. You know, it's their job every day to get the stock price up. And then there's a board of directors, and it's their job to make sure the CEO gets the stock price up. And if they— he doesn't, he's gone because the board is responsible. And above that layer, you also have, uh, actually the White House and the Federal Reserve Board also, believe it or not, uh, they have a vested interest in the market going up as well, which is probably why you've heard Donald Trump tweeting and Howard Bassett and a lot of the people in the administration talking about buy, this is a good time to buy, don't sell. I mean, they've been very direct talking about people and their shares. So I would just say for people, I know this is a trying time. I know it's concerning. Nobody likes to see their values go down or their statements go down, especially when you hear this news flow that we have and you hear rhetoric that we've never heard before with so much uncertainty. I'm just going to remind people, the CEOs, it's their job to sort of navigate what's happening with the tariff, to decide how they're going to continue to move their businesses forward. And how to keep the stock price up. So I think when we get through earnings again, it starts tomorrow. My prediction is you're going to hear a lot about stock buybacks, particularly companies with strong balance sheets, which are the ones that we own. Not a lot of debt, a lot of surplus cash. You start hearing about— right now we're in a quiet period, so companies can't say much and they can't institute buybacks. But you will start hearing them in earnest. We heard from Avago, which is the big chipmaker, earlier this week doing a $10 billion buyback. I guarantee you, you'll hear more of those throughout this earnings season.

Okay, Nolan, thank you for kind of the update on what the lay of the land is. I want to talk more forward-looking and what opportunities there are. So a couple of things we've been talking about— technology, which we've gone over a little bit here, but also income securities is something that we've discussed. And, you know, part of that is some of the strategy that we did moving, moving a little bit to Treasuries, but also There are other income securities out there. Explain the role of income securities that we have in client portfolios in a moment like right now.

Right. So on the one hand, you have stocks. They— most stocks don't pay a ton of income, but you get your money in capital gain. We buy something at $20 and it goes up to $30. That's how you make your money. And then on the other side of the coin, you have fixed income or bonds. They don't generally go up or down very much. You get paid current income. But there's this basket of securities in the middle where they have more volatility than bonds, but not as much volatility as stock, and they pay more income than stocks. In some cases, they pay the same or more than bonds. So they kind of sit in this, uh, this middle world, if you will. Um, and they come in many different structures, and a lot of income securities get their income from a variety of different activities. Shipping pipelines, mortgages. There's a lot of different areas, but they're, they're crafted to pay out most of their income or most of their return in the form of current income. These are generally paid in dividends. Some of them are paid quarterly, and then some of them actually pay monthly. The income streams on them, unlike bonds— bonds typically are always 100% taxable as ordinary income. But in the income security world, some of them are taxed as qualified dividends, which you get a lower rate on. And so they're tax advantaged.

Okay, excellent. I also want to talk about strategy going forward. So like we've said, we've gotten slightly more defensive, moving away from things that are more economically sensitive and more that tend to have more volatility in times like these. But we also have to look forward in terms of a strategy of how to, you know, get back on offense and what we need to do, what we need to see in the markets so that we might feel a little bit more comfortable in doing so. So I want to ask you, Nolan, what is the sign? What would signs of a bottoming look like for you in terms of what would we see in the market that would make us feel like it's time to get back off of the defensive footprint that we kind of have right now?

So I would— first off, I wouldn't say we were defensive. I'd say we're balanced.

More balanced. Yes.

Yeah, balanced. And I would say there's a few things to let you know. Maybe we've reached the bottom. One of them is volatility. You know, this 1,000-point move every day is not normal. That's recession or bear market activity, and it's not normal. So one of the things that we would look for is just calmer markets. and smoother markets. So that would be one. The other thing is markets responding well to good news. We get a good economic report, the market going up, and if it's a bad market, uh, economic report, the market going down. So I would say those two things, I would say, um, definitely I would, um, would be signs that we are starting to act normal again. And they can't get here too quick.

Okay. And then, you know, I obviously we're all focused on kind of the negative aspects of what's going on, particularly in Washington. But there are some things on the horizon that could go right and make things a little bit more, a little more palatable for investors. So what could go right? What are you looking at that could go right that could make things kind of turn around in a more positive direction?

So there's a few things that could go right. But let's— I want to talk first about what could— I think what the market's worried about is what could go wrong. We talked about the tariff talk, and I think it's confusing to a lot of people. I think the rhetoric is really upsetting to people, particularly our allies. You know, we've had these countries, China, Mexico, Europe, who have been our allies, and now we're being very pugnacious toward them. I think the other thing the market's worried about is, hey, if there's tariffs, then the price of everything's going to actually go up, and that's inflationary. And if you get inflation in the short term and the economy just kind of doesn't do well, then that's called stagflation. And we had that in the '70s and it didn't end well. So I think those are the things that bother people. Plus, the other thing too, I think that bothers people is the last time we had this big tariff dust-up was in the 1930s with another Republican president, Hoover, during the Great Depression with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs that many people think exacerbated the Great Depression. So I think all of those things are in the background. I think that's why people are really kind of spazzed out. And I think these CEOs themselves they're in a pickle. I think CEOs, publicly traded CEOs, are going to earn their money. I know a lot of criticism the last couple of decades about, about how much they're paid versus the average worker. But I think this year they're going to actually earn it because they're going to have to figure out how to navigate. You know, if you're a company that manufactures something overseas and you import it because it's cheaper to do that, but now you're getting penalized for not manufacturing here, you know, to set up most factories here, even if you do it in an expedited fashion, you're talking about 3 to 4 years. This administration may not be there. So what do they do? So I think all of those things the market knows. And I think that's one of the reasons that the market's been so volatile and we've had this heavy downdraft. So with that as a backdrop, what could go right? Well, there's a lot that could actually go right. One of them is We've heard yesterday one of the things that caused the rip yesterday is it looked like the White House was actually paying attention to the market, starting to be more reasonable. They put a pause on tariffs for 90 days to start to negotiate some of these deals. So one of the things that could go right is we could— all of this tariff noise could just be that it could end up being the tariffs are dropped. Around the world, that would, that would be good for businesses, good for economies, and certainly good for our economy and good for prices. And instead of being inflationary, we can get to some prices maybe being lower because the tariff barriers are gone. So that would be one that could, that could go right. And that would be really what— that would be good. Another one is we could avoid recession. The market has priced in recession and possibly something worse. To the extent we do not get a recession, that would be good. The other thing that could be good is Jerome Powell, uh, the Treasury— the Federal Reserve Board could look at all of this and decide to lower rates to stimulate the economy. That would be very positive. Lower, you know, interest rates kind of have been anchored, you know, on the 10-year around this 4 to 5% range. And even on the 2-year, we haven't gone down a whole lot. So I think lower interest rates could be helpful. But the other thing past that, Donald Trump came into office and we were thinking lower taxes and they hadn't got to that yet. So this administration could be being sly as a fox. They could want to deal with the hard stuff first, like tariffs to raise revenue in order to give us tax cuts on the back end, or at least make the tax cuts that are scheduled to sunset permanent. That would be a big boost economically. So all of those things could go right. Okay.

Just wanted to let everyone know kind of what we were looking for and signs of things getting better. So that's— with that being said, I wanted to look at some actions that are possible to take. You know, when we see down drafts in the market, that's opportunities to shift things around in the portfolio, take advantage of harvesting tax losses and a number of other strategies that are available in a time like this. So, Nolan, first thing I want to ask you is what are some actions that clients and non-clients can take in the immediate term in response to what we're seeing?

So there are, there are a couple. So I think anybody that has a 401(k), I would look at that, particularly if you're— it's a job that you're no longer at and for whatever reason you just left the money there. The reason I say that is investment choices. You know, a lot— most people's 401(k), if you look at them, is in some type of target date fund. And if you pop the hood on what's in there, it's not a lot of things that you'd like to own. A lot of international is going to be in there. We've seen a lot of people own small caps. Those are going to be areas that are really disadvantaged in this, in this market. I'd much rather have my money in the USA and primarily I want to own individual securities. You know, I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that, you know, I feel really good about owning something like a Costco or Walmart or Netflix. And I can name you many, many names. It doesn't matter what happens in the economy. I mean, this is my never sell stock. I'm just never going to sell it. But you can't say that in a mutual fund or target date fund. A lot of them have huge allocations internationally, which I think is fraught with peril, or small caps or other things. You want to know what you own in a market like this. So if you have money that's in a 401(k) sitting, we're going to strongly consider you think about moving it, whether it's with us or another. You know, if you're not a client, I would actually just think about moving it. The other thing is, if you do have a— if you work for a company that's a publicly traded company and you have the ability to buy company stock, depending on if you own any already, this may be a great time to do the net unrealized appreciation strategy. That is where you actually put a certain amount of your account in the company stock today at a lower price. If the stock appreciates between now and age 55, there's a huge tax advantage when you distribute the stock. So that may be another opportunity for people to take a look at. And the final one I would just mention is Roth. You know, we're huge proponents here of the Roth. You showed that chart earlier, Brian, that took a look at tax rates and the debt that we have. I think the government's just getting started on raising taxes. Now, they didn't raise them on the income tax 1040 level, but make no mistake about it, a tariff is a tax on the consumer. As a way to pay down the debt. The more serious they get about attacking this debt, the more serious they're going to get about having us all pay more taxes. I think having money in a Roth to tax-proof yourself, I think it's just really, really smart. We're still in the first half of the year. So whether it's a backdoor Roth or a conversion or even a contribution for some people who are in a lower tax bracket with earned income, I'd strongly think about my Roth strategy as well.

And one more I wanted to ask you, Nolan, and I know people who are close to retirement or in retirement, it definitely stings a little bit more when we have these downdrafts in the market. But I wanted you to talk about what is the flip side of that. So taking advantage of this to get, you know, lock in higher yields on income-producing investments. Can you talk about how we're viewing that.

Sure. So we've talked for at least the last couple few years and really racked our brain trying to get higher yields. You know, historically as a firm, we've dealt with retirees who need to replace— needed to replace a paycheck they were getting from work. And in the early days of the firm, right up to a couple years ago, um, our number one go-to was corporate high-yield bonds. These are corporations that have outstanding debt, um, and they pay an interest payment, and then they guarantee your principal at the end. But because it's a corporation making the guarantee and not the U.S. government, you get a higher yield than the government would pay you. Right now, the 10-year Treasury is about 4%. So if you bought a 10-year Treasury bond, you can get 4%. And going back a couple of months to the beginning of this year, if you bought a 10-year corporate bond BB, which is investment grade or so, you weren't getting over 5.5%. Every now and then you can get 6% if you just went out on your duration or your maturity date. But when you have the market that gets stressed, that spread goes up. So a lot of those bonds maybe earlier this year that were paying 6%, now they're up close to 7.5% or so. If we get more stress, you're going to start seeing some stuff at 8%, 8.5%, maybe 9%. And it's a great opportunity to take a second bite at the apple. We can actually go in and lock in— if you can lock in 8 or 9% yields and you can do that for 8, 9, 10 years, you know, that's a win. If you can get 9% over 8 years, you double your money and you do it in something that's pretty persistent as far as the income.

Okay. Thank you for that, Nolan. We are going to kind of wind it down in terms of the presentation. I want to know— I want everyone to know The Q&A is open. If you've got questions, get them into the Q&A box. Freddie's going to moderate a Q&A session. We'll go all the way through and whatever questions you got, we're going to make sure we get those answered. But we did have a couple of just quick housekeeping details for you guys, things that are coming up, previews of upcoming events. So I think in the chat box and I'll ask, I'll ask China to put these up again in the chat box. But we'd like everyone to try to get set up with a review meeting at some point in the next few months. Don't leave it toward the end of the year. If you're on the call and you don't— if you're not on the call, if you're seeing the recording, we just want to send you over to leftbrainwm.com. We're going to ask you to schedule your financial checkup. Click on that and fill out the form there. It's going to ask you to— it's going to send you to our calendar. But what we have noticed is the fact is that sometimes When you submit the form, the pop-up blocker will block you from getting to our calendar. So make sure that you disable the pop-up blocker at that time so that you can set up with your advisor. If you are a client of LeftBrain, please set up with your advisor directly. If you're not a client of LeftBrain and you want to speak with us, please set up with me, Brian Dress. And then finally, on April 29th, we do have a cybersecurity webinar that we will be holding. That is, that is a Tuesday, again, 4:00 PM, our normal time for these events. But we have noticed over the last couple of years some of our clients have been vulnerable to attacks. Everyone is vulnerable to attacks in the cybersecurity world. And so we want everyone to be vigilant and we want to share some of the tips that we're putting in place, not only for clients, but also to help you protect yourself outside, outside of what you do with us. And then finally, YouTube. So Nolan and I just completed a YouTube that's going to go up soon. We've got a couple of other videos that are in the pipeline. And if you're— you obviously, if you're on with us, you're seeing the video, but we're going to be putting this recording up on our YouTube as well. So we do urge you to subscribe to our YouTube. We're up with all the, all the time with different types of content, trying to help you not only with markets but also with personal finance details. So with that being said, I'm going to turn things over to Freddie Garcia. He's our Vice President of Investments. Many of you do work with him as an advisor. I'm going to ask him to do, to moderate the Q&A session. And again, if you have questions, please put those in the chat box. We're going to cover all the questions that you've got. With that, thanks, and we'll turn it over to Freddie.

Thanks, Brian, and great job. And we appreciate everyone joining us today so they could hear all this great information. I know Nolan covered a lot during the presentation, so we appreciate you guys sending in these questions and I'm going to ask them basically in the order that they came in. So let's start with the first one. So the first one was, why did you get into 10 and 20-year Treasury bonds?

Well, the thought is when things get really dicey in the markets, the Fed generally will step in and cut rates. And when they do that, you generally will get a pop in the Treasury markets. The other thing that could happen is when the tariffs finally do get settled or a deal gets done, we expect there to be some relief in rates. Either way, we're not expecting this to be kind of a long-term investment. This is something to kind of balance out the volatility of the portfolio. And we expect here in very short order, especially as we get through the earnings season here in the next couple of weeks, Once we get really comfortable that the businesses that we're watching have a plan for navigating tariffs and that their earnings are not impacted, we expect to be moving out of Treasuries into stocks in fairly short order.

So the next question is, what's your thoughts on using momentum investing to maximize gains in tax-advantaged accounts?

Momentum investing to maximize gains in tax-advantaged accounts. So momentum investing as a factor does work. That's one of the things that has been persistent over time. You just have to be really careful. Right now, there's not a lot of momentum happening. There was until about February 14th, and you just need to be careful that you're not just buying something before— because it's going up from a price standpoint. It needs to have business momentum as well. So I do think as an investment strategy, historically it's been a winner. I expect it to continue to be a winner. Um, but you know, you have to make sure that you're not doing like the GameStop meme stock type investing, that you're actually going for businesses that are fundamentally sound. We have an acceleration in business fundamentals followed by a, um, a movement in the stock price.

The next question is, what is the impact of the deficit? Is it a macroeconomic risk or long-term, uh, long-term for our portfolios?

So I think it's both. It is a macroeconomic risk. I think Washington also views it as a national security risk. You know, that deficit spending is funded by foreigners. You know, a good chunk of our national debt outstanding is not in U.S. hands, it's in non-U.S. hands. And I think the big fear is some country could try to retaliate, like China, and kind of start dumping all of their holdings, which obviously would drive chaos in our bond markets. And so I think it is a macroeconomic impact. And if that happens, it does impact our portfolio. To the extent that doesn't happen and there's just kind of a normal cure for it, um, I don't know that there's any direct impacts unless it just goes wild. I mean, if the, um, the debt and the deficit could create a crisis— as long as it doesn't create a crisis, we have an off-ramp to solve it, I think we'll be fine. But, um, to understand what could go wrong, all you have to do is look at Japan. Japan has more problems because they have a population issue where they have declining population, more old people than young people. So they're kind of in a death spiral right now, but they're also in a deflationary spiral and their debt-to-GDP ratio is really out of control. So they have really strong fiscal problems. I think Washington does not want us to get into that situation. So I think that's why they're being so aggressive now. to do something to keep deficit under control. But yeah, we cannot let the deficit keep growing out of control. I mean, we're all going to end up paying for it. Um, so something needs to be done. Eventually there will be a forcing issue and it will impact all of us if, you know, as a country we don't come up with a solution for it.

I'm just making a note to not move to Japan anytime soon. Okay, so next question is, what's your feelings on NVIDIA? Uh, it was noticed that we traded a bunch last week and it bounced back a lot. Was that due to a tariff-related concern or something actually related to their business? And for those of you listening, we did trade some of NVIDIA, but only a portion of it, and only in the retirement accounts.

Yeah, good point, Freddie. And the other thing I would just say is we were overweight, uh, NVIDIA for most people. As you guys know, we're not a big fan of trimming winners. Um, we like to let our winners run. As long as they're doing well. And with NVIDIA, it had been an overweight for people. We were comfortable with that. But something started to change earlier this year. It started with the Deepseek news. I think people started to kind of theorize, what if AI spending is a bubble? What if companies don't need to spend as much to do the same thing? And I think people were comfortable with the 2025, 2026 numbers on NVIDIA, but people started to question what happens at 2027 or later. And then finally, finally, I think the other question around NVIDIA is the tariffs. Um, you know, the U.S. is trying to keep China away from these high-tech NVIDIA chips, and I think people fear that the White House is going to slap more restrictions on NVIDIA exporting their chips to China. So I think all of those started to make NVIDIA shares started to come down a little bit. Now, we still are very comfortable owning NVIDIA. We like the business. We, we're owning it for the long term. Historically, chips have been cyclical. So you have a cycle and then you move on to another cycle. And so you get these kind of booms and busts in chips. You can see it outside of about 2 or 3 chips. You look at AMD, you can look at Intel, Texas Instruments, NXPI. There's a lot of the ASML. A lot of these chip stocks, about 4 or 5, they're really pulling the index up. So we just wanted to have a little bit more balance in the portfolio at this time. And there's some other chip stocks that we're looking at that we do like. We're not— we haven't bought anything yet. We just kind of parked the cash, but we thought it was better to trim it. Now, we're still overweight NVIDIA as a firm. It's our number one holding. And like Freddie mentioned, we couldn't sell it in taxable accounts because we really didn't want to do anything to realize capital gains. But in the retirement accounts where we don't have to pay taxes, we thought it made sense to just trim the position somewhat.

What's the possibility for a recession percentage for this year that we are using internally?

We don't use an internal recession percentage. I actually— it feels to me like whether we go into one or not is not relevant. I mean, you don't generally know until You know, the definition of a recession is 2 quarters of negative GDP growth. And right now we haven't had one. We still have positive GDP growth. But rather, in the National Board of Economic Relations, NBER, really tells us after the fact, it could be a year later that they told us it was in a recession. But I'm telling you, the stock price movement is what we look at. The market has priced in a recession already. So to the extent we don't get a recession, that could be upside for the market. And even if we got one at this point, it looks to me like it's, it's priced in. Also, I'll just mention we don't really run from recession in, in portfolios. You know, you can make a lot of money during recession. I know a lot of people are looking at the volatility and kind of shaking their head and look at what the portfolio was in February versus today. But we take a look at what the portfolio is likely to be 2 or 3 years from now versus today. And what some of these prices of these businesses are today versus what they will be in 2 or 3 years. And so we really like kind of the holdings. We like what we see on the landscape. I'll tell you what, I have never seen better businesses with better business models, with profitable business models, with good management and good business plans ever in my career. Ever. And I said that— I've been saying that for 8 months right in through February. I'll still say that today. And a lot of these shares of the stocks I like best are down 40, 50— some of them are down 50% from where they were in February. I think that's just madness. I think 2, 3 years from now you're going to look back and say, man, that was a great time to have purchased. So I think the recession thing, whether we get one or not, if we do, it'll be manufactured by us just based off of these tariffs. The economy is underneath has been really, really strong. And even with the tariff talk, it's still very resilient. People are still outspending. Again, the CEO of Amazon was on this morning. He said there's been a zero decrease in spending right up through yesterday.

The next question is, what are our thoughts on real estate as an investment? And then they also added also on Bitcoin as well.

Freddie, I'm going to give you the Bitcoin since you're a resident Bitcoin expert. Yeah, let me take— I'll take real estate. So I'm not sure if the questioner is asking about investment property in the real world or REITs in the stock market, but I'm going to— I'll address both of them. I think the residential real estate market right now is in a really tough place. I— Brian didn't mention this earlier, but I write a letter for you guys every year, Nolan's Notes, and We spent a lot of time internally penning that letter, and it was just released today. China is going to be emailing it out. It's on our website. If you go to our website now, you'll find Nolan's Notes. It'll pop up for you. I think China will probably put a link and then she'll be emailing it. So you'll get it over the next, you know, 24, 48 hours. But I mentioned that what's happening in real estate in the— in Nolan's Notes, really tough time in the real estate market, you know, Interest rates are really high. Mortgage rates are still over 6 in many cases for a 30-year fixed at 6, 6.5. It's come off the boil at 7, but still 6.5 is a, you know, is a really big number. And even though last year real estate transactions were down, prices were up. So what that means is homeownership affordability is lower than it's been in years. So I think real estate markets are going to be tough. And they're going to be tough going forward, especially if we go into a recession or the job market cracks or this tariff talk really leads to higher levels of inflation. That's going to be really tough for residential real estate. Now, as far as REITs go, these tend to be commercial or industrial properties. Uh, you're talking about tens or 20 or hundreds of billions of dollars, and then they take the equity and slice it up and trade it publicly on the, uh, on the stock market. So it trades like a stock even though the underlying asset is some commercial property, and REITs are generally known because they pay a rate of interest. Now interestingly, the yields on REITs aren't fantastic. You know, most REITs have a yield of 5% or lower. There's a few that we have— Starwood is one that we've owned for a while that has a yield of about 9%, though they haven't raised the dividend in a while. So we do follow REITs, but most of the yields are 5% or below. Which we think are okay, not fantastic. REITs had held up in the stock market until about the last 3 or 4 weeks, and this latest downdraft has really dragged everything down. Remember also, real estate is interest rate sensitive. So real estate's going to do best when interest rates are low and falling. And right now, interest rates aren't low, nor are they falling. And with the tariff talk, if the tariff is inflationary, interest rates could tick up a little bit. So I don't think it's a wonderful time for REITs. One area of real estate we have been looking at that has our attention, that's the office market. So you guys will know after COVID, everybody started to work from home. Corporations cut their office footprint and most people or a lot of people were working remotely and in a lot of parts of the country, you know, you go to downtown or even some of these suburban office parks, you're going to see empty real estate all over the place. And these landlords have had a really, really, really tough time. And even when people started coming back, they didn't want to come back to those old buildings. They wanted to come back to something new and modern. So not only did you not have tenants paying rent, you also had to spend a lot of money sprucing the place up. Not good. However, the pendulum has swung and now people— the boss is ordering employees back into the office. So all this vacant commercial real estate, now you're starting to get absorption. People come back. And so that's an area now that was distressed that in our eyes is starting to look more interesting. So we haven't done anything with REITs, but that is an area that we're looking at, which is commercial properties to the extent we can buy something cheap with a yield that we think may go up. I think that's something that could be interesting.

You know, as far as the questions on Bitcoin, I mean, one of the things I always remember with Bitcoin is it's not so much a diversifier because it's very much correlated to the market. If you look at what the NASDAQ is down today, they almost match up. So year to date, NASDAQ is down by 18, Bitcoin's down about 18. Today the market with NASDAQ was down about 4.5%. Bitcoin was down about 4.5%. So they're very much correlated with the same movement. So one of the reasons why we haven't used it is because as far as return goes, we've been able to find that we can buy large-cap stocks and get just as good a return as we could on Bitcoin, but we're able to actually get earnings reports and monitor and follow, uh, with stocks where we can't do that with Bitcoin. There is no earnings reports, there is no measurement on it. So for those that have considered Bitcoin as an alternative to this or as a market hedge, it's not. It's pretty much in correlation with, um, with the market right now.

So I would say too, buddy, to add to that, it's somewhat of a surprise, you know, if you— I'm surprised we don't have any questions on traditional gold, the, the yellow metal. You know, gold actually has, has held up.

Yes.

Uh, this year. Yeah, yeah, it really has done well. Gold, silver, even the gold miners have done very well. Versus Bitcoin, that's somewhat a surprise because the story of Bitcoin always that it was a non-correlated asset and it's an insurance against fiat currencies. Well, wouldn't you know, the US dollar is getting pounded this year and Bitcoin is not doing what the promise of Bitcoin was. So not that you can't own it, but it's— you're right, it's a different analysis.

Questions about bonds. So what, what outlook already do you have for purchased corporate bonds? Right now, all of our bonds are down.

Yeah, for all purchased corporate bonds, I wouldn't worry about them. Remember, they all have a guarantee and a maturity date. And as long as the company doesn't default, you're going to get your interest and you're going to get your payment. So generally what happens is during times of economic stress, there's not a lot of buyers, and corporate bonds generally trade at a premium to Treasury bonds. And when people get real— there is a correlation between corporate bonds and stocks. It's not one-to-one, but there is a correlation. So if you see a bear market, generally you will see the current price of bonds go down. Doesn't change the income stream, and it doesn't change the fact that you're going to get repaid when they're over with. So we see this all the time. Every couple of years you get some stress in the market. The price of bonds currently go down as long as you're not selling, as long as there's no default, there's no issue. That's what me and Brian were talking about earlier. Quite, quite contrary. We think the corporate market, corporate fixed income market right now is pretty strong. Leverage in the system's pretty low. Corporations have done a really good job of financing their debts. And so we think this is a good time to actually think about buying more corporate bonds. Yields are a little bit higher. They're still not You know, yields are in the 7s. You know, a lot of these bonds that we've been buying over the last couple years were in the 6s, some of them were in the 5s. And so right now, if they're priced to 7, that just means the price is going to come down somewhat. Um, so not anything alarming, but once they got to about 8, um, we would think about being an aggressive buyer, uh, for at least the clients that like income, uh, of bonds.

So this question is, President Trump talked about his tariff policy throughout his campaign. Would you characterize the dramatic shift from market excitement to market fear as the tariffs taking the market by surprise? And if so, why didn't the market anticipate this?

So I think a little bit of it is one, I don't think they expected global tariffs on every country, including ones we already had agreements with. Um, that would be one. And I think a lot of investors thought the tariffs were more of a negotiating tactic. I didn't think they— I don't think the market anticipated them to be actually implemented. And I say that because markets started to get wobbly right around Valentine's Day in anticipation when the tariff talk really started to ratchet up right in through April 2nd. April 2nd, really, kind of was a surprise, uh, to be honest. Usually in the market it's buy the rumor, sell the news. So markets sell in anticipation. Once something happens, the pressure is released, markets kind of go back to normal. So everybody knew April 2nd was going to be Liberation Day. Market sold off in anticipation for 8 weeks or 6 weeks. Then the announcement, the market sold off more and had a fit over the next 2 days. So again, that tells you the market wasn't prepared for it. No, the market did not believe there were going to be worldwide tariffs, global tariffs for every country, including our trading partners, with that much vitriol. The market was not priced for that. And that's not an opinion. That's just fact based off of price.

So this next question, how about rebalancing the portfolios to take advantage of equities, which you believe will appreciate higher than others? So just to add to everyone, because as we did the trades on this, that's exactly the thinking process behind the changes that we made last week. You know, we traditionally don't use ETFs, and many of them you will now notice that we do have a lot of ETFs strategically placed in there. We used individual tickers because our goal is overall to get out of those. They're not long-term positions. We did add some new stock names on there that you may not have seen before, but those ETFs are just placeholders because we're going to exactly go into other positions to rebalance out the portfolio. So, so no, we're right on that thinking. And I don't know, Nolan, if you want to add to that.

No, I agree with you. I just was gonna, um, to wrap up, to add to your point, we're very optimistic, um, on this year, and we're not giving up, uh, on positive returns. It may be— I think it might be just a tale of two markets. First half of the year, we might struggle, but the second half of the year, my goodness, do we have a lot of momentum. One, we'll have the tariff talk behind us. And then remember, we'll be getting ready for midterms. And I think President Trump might be sly as a fox in that you want to get all the bad stuff out early in your term, just get it out there, and then you have the good stuff come later. You know, you have your dessert after the meal, and that may be what's happening. But we know this fall we'll be gearing up for midterms and the Republicans definitely want to secure seats in the House and in Congress. So we think there's a lot of good stuff to come. But by then, corporations also will have had time to digest. The tariff thing will be settled one way or the other. Even if they're going to be tariffs, companies will be able to have a strategy around it. And once all of that stuff is out of the market, the market can go back to doing what it does, which is pricing businesses. As long as we know the rules of the game, the market's so frustrated now because it doesn't know the rules of the game. Um, so yes, I am very optimistic on our ability to find winners. Somewhat surprising that the stocks we like the best have fallen the most, um, this year. It wasn't true through February. Well, the last 6 weeks that has been the case. So we're just waiting for, um, sort of for them to finish falling to get comfortable that the expectations have been reset. Um, but I'm comfortable. We— the stocks that we own are a really good group of stocks. Um, we have our eye on a lot of other stocks that we like a lot more. Unfortunately, they're more volatile right now than what we'd like. We're not comfortable with 10 or 15% movements a day of stocks. It's just kind of not normal. So you don't— you're not comfortable that the price that you're getting right is right, or all the news is, is in. So, you know, uh, you have to be a little comfortable, and we do make changes, but we don't make changes excessively. Generally, if we put something in there, we want it to be in there for the, for the longer term. The areas that we do like, though, have not changed. We do like tech. Hey, tech has really been walloped this year, and QQQs don't really give you the numbers. You know, if you look at these semis, which we still like, they're down 40% from their high. Software is almost in the bear market, and we really, really do like software. Cybersecurity, we talked about. Cyber has fallen off and there's about 5 tickers in cyber I would take to my grave right now. Communications, you know, Meta, you guys know, it's come down. You know, I remember in January, Meta set a record for 20 straight days of gains. It set a record. Business isn't worse now, but the shares have gone from 700 to 500. So communication services is an area that we like. And financials, we do like financials. Now, financials have really taken it in the shorts the last 8 weeks. And again, that's why I tell you that the market's still trying to price in recession, because financials will generally see it first. But financials is still a real— is still a growth area. And we still like financials. We're still going from paper currency to digital. We're still doing online transactions. And financial technology companies are still stealing the thunder from traditional banks. So all of those things are still in play. It's just that when people get really, really nervous, they tend to sell those shares first. And so you're starting to get them at a cheaper price. So once we are comfortable that things have settled down economically, we— I don't want to say we've hit the bottom, but things are— I mean, we know the rules of the road. Those are going to be the areas that we go back to. It'll be technology, communication services, financials. And industrials. You know, Uber is a name that we like in industrials. We still have Uber, um, and we have Axon in industrial. So those 4 areas are areas that we like. Historically, we have not done a lot in staples. We have not done a lot, uh, in energy. We have not done a lot in REITs or utilities or pharma. Those are typically— has been the safe havens. Not a lot of growth there. People just use that as a parking place. But those generally aren't areas where you're going to get multiples times your money on a return. So I feel really good about where we are. I feel good about where the portfolios are. The markets, I think we're— hopefully we're close to the end than we are to the beginning. But again, earnings season comes up here starting tomorrow. I think over the next 3 weeks you'll see us doing some things because we'll have some answers. Okay.

You know, and I know we haven't done this in the past, but the last question we'll finish up with is, has to do with private equity. If we see any opportunities in private equity investing.

For those of those who know me and have heard me talk, I am not a fan of private equity. If you really want to get me going, I'm not a big private equity fan. I think the biggest benefit is two big benefits that private equity has. One is they don't have to mark their book to market. So right now, if we've seen all this volatility all over the place and it's making you puke, if you're in private equity, you just see your statement and it never changes. That doesn't mean nothing's happening underneath. And then the other thing is that they just have leverage that they're able to borrow. But whenever we see a company that has been owned by private equity, we run the other way. We don't think it's an elixir. Interestingly, the stock market today is about 5,000 stocks. I think if you go back Brian, you can correct me. If you go back a couple of decades, we had about 8,000 to 9,000 stocks that were in the market. Now we have about half for publicly traded equity. So what happened to the other 4 or 5? They all went private into private equity. I think these private equity issues, these shops are going to have trouble now because a lot of these companies they've taken private, they want to get them back in public markets. But the IPO market has really been shut since about 2021. So about the last 4 years, companies come in public, the market has not been receptive of them, primarily because a lot of high-growth shares don't have premium valuations. So what that meant is private equity has been forced to hold these businesses longer than they naturally would. They've done their financial alchemy. So there's no more upside in revenue, no more financial engineering. So a lot of these are just like zombie companies. So they've layered debt on them, but they weren't great businesses to begin with. So again, I'm not a fan of private equity. There's no reason that a private business should have better returns than a public business. And so I think it's just— and you have illiquidity when you have private equity. So I'm not a fan of private equity. What I will say is we do have had exposure to a couple of publicly traded holdings that deal in the private equity market. Ares Capital is one of them and Apollo is another. ARCC is a ticker that we've owned in the past, and generally they lend money to these private equity sponsors. Private equity comes in with the equity, but those businesses are generally levered. So you're going to have debt underneath. And companies like Apollo and Ares, they're the company that loans money, the debt, to the private equity company. So we can have exposure through the debt market. But just because the equity is private doesn't mean it's better.

Thank you, Nolan, and thank you for everyone attending. Just a reminder earlier, our calendar links. If you do have more questions, we're always happy to take your questions and carry on the conversations. But for tonight, we want to make sure everyone— we want to be respectful of your time. So please feel free to use the calendar links. Also to let everyone know, Nolan's notes are now available. Are posted on our website too. It's a great read and actually covers a lot of things Nolan just mentioned here today. So I would encourage you all to take a look at those, pass them along to someone else who may have questions, because one of the things I will say is there is more misinformation about what is going on right now than there is correct and good information. So pass those along to other people just because the more we talk about this correctly and the better attitude we have about this, we will get through this and things will be okay. There are still a lot of positive things out there. So, Nolan, Brian, I'll let you guys close it out.

Thanks, everybody, for being with us. We'll mark Nolan down as a maybe on private equity and, and Bitcoin. Don't forget Bitcoin. So again, if you have questions, feel free to reach out. We will be getting a recording out hopefully early next week. If it's going to be Monday or Tuesday, we'll have to do some work tomorrow and, and see how that's going to look. But that recording will be available both for you and if you want to pass that along to others. And I'll let Nolan have the last word here.

So again, thanks for joining. I know these are stressful times, but you're right, we'll be on the other side of this. A lot of great businesses out there. Surprisingly, CEOs are sanguine. We're very interested in these upcoming earnings releases. You'll see us making changes as we see things that we have a high degree of confidence in. And for any of you that are out there that are my clients that have not scheduled or done your review this year, I have updated my calendar in through the end of the year. So right in through Thanksgiving is when I'm doing meetings. December we have for business planning and tax loss selling. So if you can grab the link, even if you're not going to schedule and you don't want to meet until Labor Day or Halloween, that's fine. You can schedule it now, but at least let's get it on the calendar.

Excellent. Thanks, Nolan. Thanks to everybody. And we'll see you again hopefully on the 29th for the cybersecurity event.