E67 First Quarter 2026 Client Letter - Mike Tyson Edition

This podcast is brought to you by Ginsler Wealth. The information discussed today is meant to be general in nature and not tailored to your specific investing circumstances. This means that you should talk to your regular Ginsler Wealth advisor or your own advisor before acting on any information we discuss today. Nothing in this podcast is intended to be a solicitation Past performance does not guarantee future returns. If you are interested in learning the secret to beating one of the greatest boxers of all time, keep listening. Today on The Unlimited Podcast, I read my 2026 first quarter letter to clients. Taking inspiration from Mike Tyson's famous quote, we discuss what we know, what we anticipated, what we tried to avoid, and how we're managing through the punches being thrown at investors today. Let's go! Hi everybody. Early April 2026. It's the time of the quarter again when I read my quarterly letter to clients for those who rather hear the sweet soothing sounds of my voice as opposed to spend time reading the letter. And this one is a little bit long, so apologies for those who have to read it. Maybe apologies for those who have to listen to it, but you can click that speed up button, which I would do. If I were you, but, uh, maybe you want to soak it in. So here we go. This is the 2026 first quarter client update. We call it the Mike Tyson edition, and you'll see why immediately. Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth. Hey, Mike Tyson quote. To Ginsler Wealth clients, if you grew up in the 1980s like me and had an original Nintendo gaming system, you You probably recognize this string of numbers: 007-373-5963. If seeing those numbers gives you flashbacks to being punched in the mouth, read on, or in this case, listen on. And if you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about, I guess you should continue to listen as well, and then you'll find out. In the mid-1980s, Mike Tyson exploded onto the boxing scene with a ferocious, crowd-captivating style. Rapidly becoming the youngest heavyweight champion in history while dispatching opponents, often in the first round, with unprecedented speed and power. His aura of invincibility and mainstream appeal made him a cultural phenomenon, extending beyond sports into global celebrity. By 1987, his dominance and popularity were cemented in pop culture with the release of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out, bringing his intimidating presence into millions of homes. My home was one of them. Like most of my 11 and 12-year-old friends, I played Punch-Out religiously. I'll pause for one second. As you know, look at the letter online, ginslerwealth.com. You can see the pictures, you can see the charts, the graphs, the disclaimers, the footnotes, the endnotes, all that sort of stuff. But in the letter, I actually have a signed reprint of a, of a snapshot from that Mike Tyson's Game of Mike Tyson himself. So, uh, let's keep going. In the game, you had to defeat a ladder of increasingly difficult fighters before reaching Tyson at the top. Glass Joe, Von Kaiser, Piston Honda, Don Flamenco, King Hippo, Great Tiger, Bald Bull, Soda Popinski, Mr. Sandman, Super Macho Man, and then Mike Tyson. It wasn't easy and took a ton of time, and that was if you could make it through. And then rumors started circling around the rough and tough schoolyard at Associated Hebrew Day School. There was a secret code you can enter when the game powered on that would get you right to Tyson: 0073735963. I must have fought Tyson 100 times, first lasting less than 5 seconds but eventually beating the greatest boxer in the world. It turns out that when you can play out being punched in the mouth over and over, you can learn how to anticipate it, accept it, manage through it, or avoid it. Tyson's quote was trash talk directed at his opponents. Every fighter stepped into that ring with a strategy, a game plan, and a team of coaches who had studied his every move. Then Tyson threw a punch. Plan over. But here's the more interesting question. What about Tyson himself when he was the one getting punched in the mouth? Because he did get punched in the mouth, literally. And his answer to that question is actually what this letter is about. He knew it was coming. He accepted it. He anticipated it. He tried to avoid it, and he managed through it. In short, he had a plan for being punched in the mouth in his job. And so do I in mine. Know it. 2026 started with a bang. My first day back after the holidays began with a bad snowstorm, but having been away for a few weeks, I was eager to get into the office and start the new year with a bang. Little did I know that was exactly what was going to happen. As I stopped at the last stoplight before reaching my office, I saw in my rearview mirror a car approaching quickly and ultimately sliding into the back of my car. I pulled over on the side street, spoke to the perpetrator, got a picture of his license plate, driver's license, and insurance, shook his hand. He didn't mean to do it, of course, and was at my office 2 minutes later. My previous experience with minor fender benders, all not my fault, of course, meant that I was able to handle what might otherwise have been an unnerving situation with calm efficiency and care. Admittedly, when I got the call from my daughter after just getting her license that she was rear-ended while at a stoplight, That was certainly a punch in the mouth. Similarly, the start of 2026 has felt unnerving and unprecedented for many investors. Trump's surprise capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and recent and ongoing war with Iran were both unpredictable events. Plus, the relentless AI narrative feels as if the world is changing daily right before our eyes. How can an investor manage when things are different this time? Well, they are not. We only have to look back to the same period last year to see similar market reactions to Trump's tariffs and other unsettling or unpredictable world events. There's a chart in the letter that I'm going to describe. It shows the performance of US and Canadian equity markets this past quarter relative to their respective performance in the first quarter last year, 2025. The lines and ending points look eerily familiar. So again, take a look at the chart in the letter. The S&P 500, the main US index, is down about 4%, just about exactly where it was last year at the same time. And the Canadian markets last year about flat, this year up 3%, but basically the line, you know, moves pretty similarly. I'm not suggesting that the rest of 2026 will turn out the same as 2025. Remember, I don't have a crystal ball, but as investors, we know that the world is always unnerving and unpredictable. Knowing what he was getting into, I doubt when Buster Douglas entered the ring with Mike Tyson in February 1990, he thought to himself, this is going to be easy. And this was likely especially the case when Tyson knocked him down in the 8th round. But looking back after he defeated Tyson by knockout in the 10th round in one of the biggest upsets in sports history, I'm sure things look great in the rearview mirror. As I've repeated too often, including my last quarterly letter about why wealth is hard, over the long term, markets have always gone up, but investors have to be ready for many punches, jabs, hooks, and a few knockouts. It's only when you look back over a long time period or make it through 10 rounds of fighting that you realize you've won. And just a reminder, in the letter there's a few links to some of the references that I'm making here. Anticipate it. Tyson undoubtedly had a plan for being punched in the mouth because he undoubtedly anticipated that might happen. Similarly, when we perform due diligence on any investment strategy, we must do so with the anticipation that something could go wrong with the strategy itself or external factors that could lead to problems. Currently, private real estate and private credit funds around the world are facing a wave of redemption requests. But because the underlying assets are less liquid, for example, it's hard to sell a building in a day. Even some of the world's largest investment firms like Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, and Blue Owl are limiting withdrawals. The industry calls this gating. The issue isn't necessarily collapsing fundamentals of the underlying assets, but a mismatch. Investors want liquidity at the same time, and the psychology of gating can actually accelerate redemption requests. A few of the private strategies we utilize have also been caught up in this acceleration of redemption requests. While no one likes to be told they can't get their funds immediately, the reality is that in the absence of this gating situation, we wouldn't have been looking to redeem anyway. Our initial and ongoing diligence gives us comfort that the underlying assets are strong. For example, the private real estate funds we are in own hundreds of apartment buildings across Canada and some in the U.S. that are close to fully occupied with tenants paying rent and investors continuing to receive distributions each month. In all instances, we are in direct and regular communication with the CEOs of these firms. Each has a plan to increase liquidity for investors. Anticipating that a problem could always arise, ensuring any holding is never an outsized portion of a client's portfolio, and really understanding the underlying assets gives us comfort to expect this situation to eventually resolve as and when investors see some liquidity flowing their way. Try to avoid it by chasing chickens. In Rocky II, Rocky's trainer Mickey tells him that to build his speed, he needs to chase the chicken, and if he can catch this thing, you can catch Greased Lightning. Again, there's links out to see that little movie clip. While Rocky replies, I'm a fighter, I ain't a farmer, this past quarter, after about 6 months of diligence, we have turned to the farmers and their chickens to help our clients avoid some of the punches that more traditional investment markets will inevitably throw at their portfolios. More specifically, we have started to allocate to a fund that lends money to Canadian farmers. As Rob Nelson, CEO of Farm Lending Canada, said during our recent podcast discussion, Farmers are the best borrowers because their farms have been in their families for generations. They sit on a street that is likely named after the family itself, and they will do everything in their power not to lose the farm. Perhaps it is no surprise, therefore, that Rob's Farm Lending Fund has never lost a penny of principal or interest in its history. While Rocky tells Mickey that he feels like a Kentucky Fried Idiot chasing the chicken, we are always extremely excited to find truly uncorrelated or less correlated investment strategies to add to client portfolios. There's a link in the letter to that recent podcast discussion with Rob. That was the last one we recorded. Highly recommend you listen to it. Very interesting to learn about farm lending. Manage through it. Once you're in the ring, you have to rely on your preparation to manage through. And sometimes it is clear that forces around you are changing and require adapting or embracing on the fly. One of those relentless forces right now is AI. I've written about our focus on AI repeatedly. Our first AI-related podcast was back in January 2023. That's centuries ago in AI terms, after we had already started investing in the space. Our approach with any new or important transformation is to learn and understand as much as possible to help us determine what it means for our clients, their portfolios, and our business. We have certainly done this with AI. As an example, this past quarter, I had the opportunity to visit NVIDIA's headquarters in Santa Clara, California, and hear directly from some of its most senior leaders about what's happening in AI and the relentless demand for its use, limited only by the world's supply of power. The message coming out of that NVIDIA visit was hard-hitting. According to NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, There will be a billion times more tokens generated in 5 years. And FYI, tokens are the units of data, like words, that AI processes and generates and charges on. In the letter, there's a few pics from my visit with NVIDIA, its headquarters, its latest supercomputer rack they call Vera Rubin, and its GPU package or chip that I held in my hand. And I strongly believe we are ahead of the curve relative to most companies and certainly most in our industry. Perhaps that is why the organizers of Future Proof Citywide, a large-scale conference held in Miami Beach dedicated exclusively to AI's impact on wealth and investment management, asked me to speak about Ginsler Wealth's implementation of AI and in particular, Ginsler.AI, my AI clone. We continue to experiment with AI inside our firm with the goal of improving operations, efficiency, and speed for the benefit of our clients. And you'll also see some pics of me and the pics from that conference. That was a few weeks ago. AI elicits both excitement and fear. In February, quote, a piece of AI science fiction rocked the stock market, end quote. Using one of my favorite phrases, Derek Thompson's Nobody Knows Anything article serves to calm down the fear. And my friend and Harvard Business School classmate Myung Cha, formerly head Apple Health Strategic Initiatives, explains why, yes, AI will likely eliminate some narrow task-based jobs, but by making cognitive work dramatically cheaper, it will also expand demand for that work, often creating more total activity, not less. Since AI can now code everything, I've personally now coded one game, two apps, and multiple reporting dashboards. One would naturally think coding jobs would be eliminated swiftly, but the exact opposite is happening. And in the article, we have a chart showing job postings for software engineers are actually rising like crazy over the last number of months. You can look at it and see all the disclosure around it. In other words, the future of work isn't fewer jobs, it's different jobs, with humans shifting from doing the work to directing, judging, and expanding it. Whether you view AI with excitement or fear, or some combination of both, the right response isn't to freeze. It's to prepare, adapt, and keep moving forward. Which, come to think of it, is probably exactly how Buster Douglas approached getting into the ring with Tyson. And by the way, remember the question I asked at the top? What does Tyson do when he's the one getting punched in the mouth? Here's his answer, in his own words, about that fight with Buster Douglas. That's one of my best because I took some expletive shots. Nobody would have took them shots. Boxing is like this game of life. Suppose I let that discourage me. Imagine if I said, man, maybe I should give it up. Maybe I don't got the heart for this no more. I would never do that. Suppose I did that instead of saying, man, that's nothing. I'll be champ in 6 months. And eventually he was twice. Even getting knocked out by 12-year-old Brian Ginsler couldn't stop Mike. And we won't stop fighting, or at least working really hard for our clients either, no matter what punches get thrown our way. Thank you for your continued trust, support, and confidence. We are available 24/7 should you need us. Sincerely, me, Brian Ginsler. Uh, okay, so that's our, uh, first quarter. Quarterly letter. Obviously lots of action in the world, lots of things changing, but that's what we're here to do is watch, adapt, learn, move, change, and be thinking about our clients all the time. So stay tuned, more coming at you from the Unlimited Podcast over the coming months. Wish you all the best. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

The Unlimited Podcast is hosted and produced by Brian Ginsler and is edited and mixed by myself, David McMillan. This podcast is not to be taken as investment advice. If you like what you heard, don't forget to rate the podcast and follow us on social media @GinslerWealth. Thanks for listening and see you next time.