E73: Third Quarter 2026 Client Letter - Cholesterol 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. And past performance does not guarantee future returns. This episode does wander briefly into medical territory, but to be clear, we are licensed to look after your wealth, not your health. Today on The Unlimited Podcast, I read my 2026 3rd quarter client update. We call it the cholesterol edition. We discuss the results of my last comprehensive health assessment, The comprehensive wealth assessment we do for clients, and what we are adding to portfolios now. Let's go! Well, hey everybody, Brian here. This is early October, meaning it is the time for me to read my quarterly letter to clients. For those who don't want to read it, but rather would listen to the smooth sounds of my voice. So we're going to get rolling here. This we are calling the cholesterol edition, and you will hear why. To Ginsler Wealth clients, this past January, I visited MedCan for my annual comprehensive health assessment. Where I rotated through a series of stations for a full top-to-bottom check. Since I hadn't eaten since the night before, Medcan sent me to the blood test first, after which I was allowed to eat their coffee and food. My trick each year is booking the earliest appointment so I can enjoy both breakfast and lunch on them. Given the cost of the assessment, I feel it's only fair. For full disclosure, Medcan is part of Ginsler Wealth's Partners Program. And provides our clients with a discount on the comprehensive health assessment and many other medical tests and services. So if you are a client listening to this, you can click the secret link in the letter that we sent you. If you are not a client, you know, you can call us. After all the stations and tests, I met with the doctor to go over the results. This is usually where I lie back and soak in all the compliments about my excellent health. So I was surprised when my usually pristine blood work showed a few out-of-range cholesterol markers. I immediately said to the doctor, this is a mistake. Test my blood again right away. He laughed and explained that it doesn't work that way, and that I should change my diet and retest in a few months. The key reductions were dairy and red meat. 2 of my favorites. I was already a reasonably healthy eater, I thought, but I was adamant that I was not going to solve this issue simply by starting daily cholesterol medication. So I built an app, of course, with embedded AI. I could take a photo of a food label, a plate, or even a whole restaurant menu and be told what was okay to eat and what to avoid. It also kept a running total of the key nutritional metrics I needed to track. For 3 months, I had no pizza, no hamburgers, no steak, no desserts, no French fries, no chocolate bars, no potato chips, no soda pop, and no juice. And I ate a lot of avocados. By my blood test 3 months later, the cholesterol numbers had returned to normal. I've since relaxed the restrictions a bit. If restaurants thought I was a pain before, I am now even worse. I am grateful for the annual checkup that caught this and glad I acted quickly. Our comprehensive wealth assessment. When a new family comes to Ginsler Wealth, one of the first things we do is our own version of a comprehensive health assessment. Or should I say comprehensive wealth assessment? We want to see everything. What do you own and why? Are different investments actually diversifying one another, or do your various advisors and managers hold many of the same securities? Is the overall portfolio consistent with what you are trying to accomplish? Sometimes everything looks great. Sometimes we find a few things that need attention, and sometimes we see the portfolio equivalent of very bad bloodwork. For prospective clients, we show them exactly what we see. Some, like me after my MedCan appointment, get serious. They decide something needs to change and often change advisors to us. Others look at the results and continue doing exactly what they were doing before. In an old Seinfeld episode, Jerry's mother, unable to comprehend that anyone might not like her son, exclaims, How could anyone not like you? I admit sometimes I have my own version. How could anyone not become our client? Apparently, it happens. You can show someone their portfolio cholesterol, but you can't make them eat the avocado. Your portfolio needs a checkup too. You are already a client, so you are covered. But to be clear, we give your portfolio a checkup all the time, not just when you join and not just once a year. We monitor your investments, meet regularly with the managers we invest with, and continuously ask whether every investment still deserves its place in your portfolio. As I discussed with Ira Gluskin during his interview of me last year, one important difference between us and many large financial institutions, and even some of our smaller peers, is that we do not manufacture investment products that we then need to sell to you. We have no proprietary mutual funds, structured products, or quote unquote house investments that must remain in your portfolio. So if we conclude that an investment no longer makes sense, we can change it. And every time we meet, we check the other side of the equation too. Has anything changed with you? Are your goals the same? Do you need more liquidity or less? Has your tolerance for risk changed? Has something changed in your family, business, or tax situation? In other words, before we take your financial blood pressure, we ask, how are you feeling? What we've been doing this quarter. In my last quarterly letter, I wrote about the portfolio analyses we were conducting and the changes we were considering and implementing. That work has continued throughout this quarter. Most recently, we have been focused on reviewing, and in many cases, adding or increasing exposure to high-quality bonds. Here is why. As is always the case, there's been no shortage of uncertainty in the world and markets. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has kept energy prices elevated. Inflation has remained stubborn enough that the Bank of Canada held its policy rate at 2.25% in September, while the U.S. Federal Reserve actually raised its policy rate by a quarter of a percent to a target range of 3.75% to 4%. At the same time, U.S. economic growth has remained resilient, helped by enormous investment in AI infrastructure. If that sounds contradictory, welcome to investing. Given that uncertainty, one area that is starting to look interesting again is an asset class that hasn't been particularly exciting for the last few years and hasn't contributed much to portfolio returns: higher-quality bonds, also called investment-grade bonds. As bond yields have moved higher, lending money to strong, financially healthy companies has become much more compelling. As I write this, the portfolio yields on some of the core fixed income strategies that we use are approaching 6% while still maintaining a focus on high quality as opposed to high yield or junk bonds. In the letter, we have a chart showing the yield on, in the United States, investment grade, that's high quality bonds, and how it's moved over the past few years. And the line goes pretty straight up in the last number of months, up to close to 6%. And the source of that is my good friend David Rosenberg's research. In addition, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury bonds relative to the earnings yield, what stocks pay, earnings yield of US stocks represented by the S&P 500, is the highest in the past 25 years. There's another chart that shows that history. Or in other words, what we're basically saying is you can earn more on a Treasury bond than you can on— from the dividends alone of US stocks, not necessarily the capital appreciation, but dividend yield versus interest yield on the bond. If we can now earn a reasonable return from lending money to high-quality businesses, we don't necessarily need to take significant credit risk to make fixed income worthwhile. For our clients with a relatively lower risk profile and others where appropriate, we have started to increase allocations to traditional corporate bond strategies. We generally want fixed income to play a different role than equities. We own equities for meaningful long-term growth and accept that the ride will sometimes be bumpy. Fixed income can provide income, greater predictability, and ideally some ballast when other parts of a portfolio are struggling. We also expect our recent gold allocations to act defensively should times of stress arise or continue. Speaking of gold, in September, Juan and I visited the secret vault in Toronto that stores the physical gold owned by the gold fund we invest in for Good news: the gold is there, it's real, and we saw it with our own eyes. Bad news: I am very weak and could barely lift a bar. Any Ocean's Eleven type heist plans died on the spot. Healthcare on the Unlimited Podcast. Healthcare also took over the Unlimited Podcast recently. Last month, I spoke with my old grade school classmate Mara Lederman, co-founder of Signal One. whose company helps hospitals govern and monitor the fast-growing number of AI tools being deployed throughout healthcare. Coming later this month, Dr. Brett Belchets, emergency room physician, co-founder and CEO of Maple, and his biggest claim to fame, advisory board member at Gensler Wealth. As an emergency room doctor, Brett saw patients waiting too long and doctors stretched too thin and decided that technology could change how care is delivered. Maple now provides millions of Canadians with access to virtual healthcare. According to Brett, Maple is the single busiest place of healthcare in all of Canada right now. Follow the podcast so you don't miss it. Both made big career pivots. Mara from professor to AI entrepreneur, and Brett from ER doc to tech entrepreneur. Their stories are worth a listen. You should know and have experienced that your portfolio health assessment does not end when you become a client. If we already manage your entire investment portfolio, we are doing this work continuously. If we manage only a portion of your investments and you would like us to review everything else you own, send it to us. We are happy to provide a complete second opinion, as the doctors say, of your overall portfolio at any time. This offer is open to non-clients as well, by the way. Unlike MedCan, there is no additional charge. Consider it year-round care. And of course, because wealth is hard, hashtag wealth hard, we are always available to help with your overall financial fitness. While your health is unquestionably more important than your wealth, so keep eating those avocados, we'll leave the former to the doctors and continue to take care of the latter. No waiting room required. Thank you for your continued trust, support, and confidence. We are available 24/7 should you need us. Sincerely, me, Brian Ginsler, President and CEO. That's our quarterly letter. That's what we're up to. That's what I'm up to. We have a, as I said in the letter, Brett Belchets on the Unlimited Podcast coming out imminently. And a very special— my guests are, or my listeners are tired of hearing me say special, but we have a special series that I'm trying to, or that I might try to start here. We're going to start with one. And we'll see what evolves. We have a client of ours, a family office client who actually on his insistence, just because he's, I guess, pleased with what we're doing, wanted to tell his story and a little bit about his journey with us. And so maybe we'll have our Wealth Hard Client Series over the next little while. It's pretty rare in our industry to share details of clients. Of course, we never do that unless of course they tell us they want to or to do that. So this, this will be pretty interesting. That's coming soon as well. So, you know, listen, keep listening and we'll talk to you soon. And for our clients, feel free to reach out at any time. And if you're listening and you're not a client, and as I said in my letter, you want a little health assessment or wealth assessment of your own, we are here to help. All the best. 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.