How to Invest Like a Billionaire with Bob Fraser

This is a Next Level Income podcast episode (YouTube) where host Chris Larsen interviews Bob Frazier (CFO & chief macro strategist, Aspen Funds) about his new book Invest Like a Billionaire and Aspen Funds' approach to private alternatives. Frazier recounts his path from UC Berkeley computer scientist and dot-com founder (raised $44M) to trader to co-founding Aspen Funds after the financial crises. Core takeaways: ultra-high-net-worth allocators tilt far less to public equities (≈20–30%) and more to private alternatives (≈50–60%); private alts offer uncorrelated returns and "superpowers" (tax benefits and inflation hedge for real estate; high income, downside priority and liquidity for private credit); construct portfolios via an "alternative investment continuum" (private real estate → private credit → natural resources); disciplined portfolio construction, rebalancing, and due diligence are emphasized. Frazier also offers a macro view: elevated equity valuations implying muted 10-year expected returns, stickier inflation, higher-for-longer rates, and tactical views on gold as a modest hedge.
Questions this video answers
About 20–30% in the stock market.
About 50–60% in private alternatives.
$44 million.
A $100 million private credit fund with ~1,000 mortgages and ~50–60 payoffs per quarter.
Chapters
The stock market today, you think you're diversified. If you're, you know of an index fund, it's not diversified.
Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larsen. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. On today's show, I'm pleased to have Bob Frazier. Bob is CFO and chief macro strategist for Aspen Funds, a fund sponsoring multiple asset classes including private credit, commercial real estate, distressed debt, energy, and others. Aspen focuses on data driven investing, identifying top macro trends, then constructing opportunistic investment funds. Bob is known for his data driven and paradigm shifting lectures and is co host of Aspen's Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. And today, Bob's going to share some of what you will learn in his new book by the same name, Invest Like a Billionaire. Bob is former magna cum laude UC Berkeley computer scientist. He's a tech startup founder that he's going to talk about today, as well as an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the year award winner. He's been happily married for 40 years and has four amazing grown children. And I'm proud to say that I am friends with some of them. Stay tuned and learn how to invest like a billionaire on today's podcast. Bob, welcome to the show.
Yeah. So good to be here. Looking forward to it.
Yeah, man, I'm, I'm excited. I, I got to know you. I've known your son for several years and some of the members of your team, but I got to see you speak a couple years ago and you know, you're one of the people that I look and I say, wow, like he, you know, he thinks the same way I do. But you've got, you've got a few more years of experience than I do. I just, I really enjoyed hearing you talk about the way you view things from an, you know, an investment perspective and, and the framework that you bring to your business, Bob, and I'm excited to have you share some of that with the audience today.
Yeah, all the mileage of old age, can I guess, have some dividends, you.
Know, hey, if you apply it correctly. Right. But we're really excited because you guys just came out with a new book, Invest Like a Billionaire and one of the Things that we really try to do here at Next Level Income is to help educate people not only on the pathways to making more money and keeping more of that money, but really how to invest. Like the ultra wealthy and I often say, like, hey, this is how you know the families that are worth 20, 30 million dollars, 100 million dollars invest. You've taken it a step further and said, hey, these are how billionaires invest and you help your investors do that. Before we dive into what listeners will see in your book and some of the lessons you've learned, Bob, do you mind sharing a little bit about your story and what you do at Aspen Funds?
Yeah, sure. Well, I got started as a computer programmer, so I was, I was a very happy coder in my little cave and love that started a dot com in, in the 90s and raised $44 million in venture capital, ended up with 300 some employees. The thing was a absolute rocket ship. And then lost everything in the dot com crash and then became a professional stock market trader after that. Lost everything again in the great financial crisis.
Oh, my goodness.
And so after that, I became kind of allergic to the public markets. Right. I mean, it's like I wanted something that wasn't narrative driven and volatile. I want something I could control. Right. So an apartment complex, right? When, when the street market crash is, you know, 25%, how many people stopped paying their rent? Not that many. You know, and so that's what I wanted is something that more control levers and buttons that I could push that I could be in control rather than have some outside forces dictate my life. And that's what me and private alts started Aspen Funds. Shortly thereafter, in the, in the aftermath of the great financial crisis we started, I had found my partner who was a master in distressed debt. And there was a lot of distressed debt. Figured out how to buy debt on the cheap and, and make money on it. And he was the genius that figured out how to do that. And I was the Mr. Scale Guy and we started Aspen. And it's been, you know, you know, steady growth ever since.
Yeah, you know, it is amazing how many people I've had on the podcast that tell similar stories. And, you know, I was, I lived it a little bit. I was investing in the stock market in the 90s while I was in college trading and just watched, you know, I was, I was making a thousand bucks a week and then, you know, make it, lose it, make it, lose it. And I was, I was like, I'm laying there 3:00am like, man, oh, it was like Vegas. And I thought I was an investor. And I'm, I'm laying there at 3am One morning, Bob, I'm 20 years old and I'm thinking to myself, and I literally got up and I drank like a Red Bull and this thought went through my head and it said, I'm going to be dead by 40 if I do this. I'm like, this is not investing. Which led me to real estate. And you know, it is, it's one of those things when you get smacked upside the head. And we just saw a big liquidation in the markets and the crypto markets and my, my young 13 year old son was saying, dad, like I want to be, I want to learn how to day trade. And I'm learning from this guy online. I go, well, how much experience does he have? And he goes, oh, he's 20, he's got a lot of experience. And I just, I laughed and I said, I said, miles, I love it. Keep learning that. I said, but let me, let me teach you, you know, what we do and how we built wealth in real estate. You know, I hope that's, that's, you know, I hope he learns that and sees that because I think there is, there's some entertainment to be had, there's money to be made in the market.
Those are such great conversations, you know, because we're also, we all started out where Miles starts out, right? You're optimistic and absolutely, it all looks great. You believe everything here and then you get to be my age and you've, you've kind of been around the block many times. I've been through four freaking cycles, dude. You know it.
Yes.
I'm ready for the next one, you know.
Yes. Yeah. And I know and I respect how you guys have positioned. So Bob, I know you've, you built, you know, the core of your business on, on, on buying just would you call it distressed debt and like kind of rehabbing notes, which, which we did, you know, 10, 15 years ago is great. You know, you could buy stuff 10, 20 cents on the dollar. It was amazing.
Exactly.
But you've evolved since then and I love how you've had a real foundation on the macroeconomic.
Right indicator. You know, we, we always knew we weren't the distressed debt guys, we were the alt investor guys. Right. And so distressed debt simply was the stage one of the, of the rocket that got us, got us into orbit. It's high margin business, it's very good business. But we always knew it was short. Right. It was just, it was A season of that. That where that stuff was available. But we knew there was great opportunities elsewhere and, and when we had a very, very diverse team. So you know, you know, Ben is a banker and really understands the, you know, debt and structure. Another one of our partners is industrial developer. Very huge experience there. And another one is just real estate. And so we kind of, we kind of started branding into these other areas really based on data. So you know, my research, you know, so what happened is after I lost everything twice, I became, I don't know, obsessed with understanding the forces, the economic forces at work. And today I still read two to four hours a day of just massive amounts of information. And I'm a speedrun reader so I just. And, and what? And, and like to understand where things are headed so I'm not blindsided. And I started making a lot of calls and they started being right and so that. So based on data then we started selecting where we want to place capital and the strategies.
Yeah. So would you share a little bit about some of the segments? I'm familiar with it, but our audience may not. Be. So where has Aspen funds expanded here over the last five or ten years outside of.
Yeah. So yeah, started out in notes but. But quickly went into multifamily several years back when that, that was, that was, you know, really accelerating. We, we got into energy. People. People do not realize what has happened in the energy sector that producing energy assets. I mean seeing oil fields so there's. There's no drilling risk, there's no geology risk, there's commodity price risk. That's all and these things are. Have. The prices have dropped 60 to 75% from pre great financial prices for, for the, for the same oil field. And it's a generational buying opportunity. People do not realize how much cash is being generated. There's. And so we branched into that based on the reshoring trend. You know companies moving back to America near shoring reshoring realized that one of the best ways to play it would be industrial real estate. And we discovered it's very difficult to buy good real estate, good industrial. But to build it is very very. It's very simple and there's a lot of ca. It just. They work. So we make a lot of money doing it. So we started building a massive industrial pipeline. And then because our debt creds and our credit creds, we just love debt. And so we started a couple credit funds that are pretty large and operate those today. And credit is one of these areas that investors don't Pay enough attention to. I find the more sophisticated investor is the more they like debt. I mean we're getting in our credit funds, we're getting equity like returns, but taking a tiny fraction of the risk. And one of the points I make in my book, and people don't do the math, they don't realize this, but losses are far more important than gains in your portfolio and mathematically that, so minimizing losses is way more impactful to your wealth, maximizing gains. And this is what the billionaires know. And so, so anyhow, so credit just fits. So, so those are some of the categories that we, we pay attention to.
I love it. And that's, that's a great transition and love, love the private credit space. We partner together as you know, with our private credit fund with you all and yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a great space. And I agree with you in that the more sophisticated investors understand, you know, that they can move down in the capital, stack to a lower volatility, a lower risk position and capture the majority of the returns, which is a, which is a sweet spot and in there. But you said, hey, this is what the billionaires do. So Bob, tell, tell us like why did you decide to write this book?
I am, I am so excited about this, this book. And you know, I found most investors, you know, have not gotten into alts are still in the, in the public markets and just subject to this incredible volatility, the public markets. And then I find the, the people that have dabbled in alts are very undisciplined and they, they don't, they don't understand what they're doing. They don't understand how to do what, what they're doing. It's more willy nilly. And I put myself in that category. You know, as I, as I wrote the book and I'm organizing all my thoughts and putting it all together really for the first time. I mean it's a lot of data that I knew a lot of things, but I pulled it all together and, and when I actually applied it own life, I realized holy smokes, I have made every mistake you can make. And it's just by just taking the deals as they come, by just doing dumb investments. I realized I really have completely misallocated and I've not, I've taken shortcuts, I've not done it right. And a disciplined approach that's based on science and mathematics is the way to go to become, to treat your investment as a business. And you are A professional investor, whether you're, you're managing 100 grand or 100 million. Right. It's, you should treat it the same. And so that's why I wrote, I wrote the book just to educate people on how to portfolio them, how these all process work, when, what their superpowers are, the math behind how to construct portfolios, how to make all, how to pull everything together, structuring due diligence, taxes, the whole thing. How to do this in a professional way.
Yeah. Now I'm sure some listeners are hearing you, Bob, and saying, okay, I've got a hundred thousand. Like, I can't, I can't invest. Like a big family office that has a team that's evaluating all these things. You know, what are, what are some things that investors that are getting, maybe getting started in the old space, have been in it for a few years. You know, I love what you say, let's maybe take it from the top down. Like how do billionaires invest differently than your average retail investor that says, hey, I'm in my 401k, I've got a 60, 40 stock bond portfolio?
Yeah, well, several things. But the most important one, they're 20 to 30% in the stock market and 50 to 60% in private alternatives. So if the stock market takes a dump, they don't wake up in panic the next morning going, oh my God, am I going to have a future? Yeah, so it's, it's, you know, and so what's, what happens is, you know, so the stock market today, you think you're diversified. If you're, you know, of an index fund, it's not diversified. 30, a third of the S&P 500 is, is 10. The top 10 companies. Yeah, you, you're buying 10 companies if you buy an index fund. And by the way, what's happened, especially since the great financial crisis, and I have a chart in the book that shows this, correlations have all gone to one, meaning every stock moves the same as every other stock. You ever notice when you have a red day, everything that's red. It doesn't matter. You know that if Amazon dumps its numbers, why do REITs sell off? You know, but they do. And, and that's the problem, that you can't get diversification. And so what happens is if you do this, this thing called, you get uncorrelated returns with things that are uncorrelated. The only way to do that is private alts.
Yes.
You end up with higher returns and, or less risk. You can really choose to take less Risk for the same level of returns or get higher returns at the same level of risk. And this is what David Swenson, who, who pioneered this whole model that revolutionized what the billionaires do called the free lunch.
Yeah. And investing Ray Dalio. Yeah. And Ray Dalio calls it the holy grail. It's like, how do you. Yeah. How do you allocate so you decrease risk but increase returns. And that's exactly what he talks about. Yeah. So just to underscore that, you know, if you look at the tiger 21 survey, which, which has, you know, you have the minimum net worth is $20 million in that group. And if you look at their survey that comes out every quarter that I get, it shows the same thing that you're talking about, Bob.
Exactly.
Yes. Yes.
They all follow this pattern. They all follow this pattern, Chris. And in 1985, when Swensen took over the Yale Endowment, all of the billionaires were in stocks and bonds, 60, 40. And they've completely changed. You can earn much higher return with much less risk by simply having an alts portfolio. But as many investors have learned through the, the multi family meltdown. Right. It's not as simple as just finding a sponsor and throwing capital at it. Right. You want to do your due diligence, you want a portfolio allocate properly in certain, in different, you know, across sectors, asset classes. And you certainly want to do your due diligence and sponsors very carefully. And I go through all that in the book as well, how to do those things.
Yeah, yeah. So as you mentioned, asset allocation is something that the billionaires do differently, something that you also mentioned. And Robert Kiyosaki says this. When I read his book shortly after I bought that first piece of real estate in college, he said, you want to be an investor as quickly as possible. And what we talk about here at Next Level Income, we say think like an investor. And that's how, as you mentioned, Bob, billionaires say we treat our investments like a business. It's out there.
Yes.
Not like that. So talk a little bit about how billionaires and family offices treat their investments more like a business versus just throwing them in a etf, for instance.
Yeah, well. And yeah, imagine you suddenly got a big inheritance and you know, and you're like, okay, well what do I do? Well, then you're going to start to get advice. Advice. You're going to start to think about, well, where do I put the money? What kind of, you know, how do I want to think about the categories I'm investing in, how Do I want to manage risk? And it's really a set to be a business owner. Right. If you're a business owner, you're thinking, how do I run this business? And most investors don't think of themselves as an investment business. They think of themselves as making some investments. So that is a key mindset shift is, is think about this and you know, create a hub LLC that is your investment business, which by the way, then can qualify mostly usually for a solo 401k. You know, all your get the tax benefits of running a business and, and it's your investment business. And go to conferences, learn things, go to, you know, masterminds, listen to great podcasts and these things. Read books. Right.
Read good books and run that expense through your business. Right, exactly. Yeah. No, I love that. And again, that is something that's fundamentally different. Most billionaires got that way because they had a business and they take that same mindset and they treat it, they treat their investment portfolio like a business and do that. There's some simple steps, as you mentioned, Bob, from a legal structure perspective, you can do that. You can set up, you know, very simple things. You can set up a separate bank account, you can run that separate P and L for that business. And take a look at that. You know, the other thing that you talk about, and you talk about this in your educational content that's around the private credit fund. You talk about how billionaires don't just allocate differently in asset classes. And we touched on this a little bit with private credit, but. But they also allocate differently in the credit stack. How does private credit fixed debt fit into that asset allocation?
Yeah, and we actually have a kind of a paradigm that we've put forth in the book. We call it the alternative investment continuum. And so it's how to approach this in a gradual fashion. So a lot of people aren't just going to go immediately start buying hedge funds, right? And, you know, and these, you know, these things. So you start with private real estate, then you go to private credit, then you go to, you know, natural resources. And, and so you kind of go up the sophistication chain. The more, the more capital you have to allocate, the more you allocate to these other areas. So, so just just to hit on, on the first one, private real estate. Well, each one of these asset classes has superpowers, okay? And so private real estate has some of the best tax benefits of any asset class. It's one of its other main superpowers is inflation protection. So when you buy real estate at real estate appreciates with inflation. But what, what you may not think about is if you're levered which all real estate pretty much is and you're levered to one which is generally what you do, you're getting a three to one lever on inflation. And if you're borrowing money to lever which you are, you're paying that debt off in dollars that are decreasing in value. So you have this triple lever on inflation. So if you, if you hate inflation, if you don't like paying more in the grocery store, we'll get on the other side of it. Right? You don't like pumping gas, you don't like what the what's your gas price will get on the other side of the pump and become an investor. So, so real estate is. Is critical the next level up which to get to your question how long answer here. Private credit is one of the areas where billionaires we are different than billionaires because very few billionaires need income. But private credit is very unique amongst all of the private alts asset classes. In that one it's high income. And if you're near retirement and you're looking for something you want to generate income. Yeah private credit is definitely where you want and it's got, it's got a couple other really unicorn kind of benefits in the private alt space besides high income there it's generally safer because you're down the credit stack. Right. You're letting everybody else take equity risk. Right. You're just.
Do you mind Bob, do you mind drilling down. I'm sorry to interrupt but I think this is a really important point point. Do you mind just drilling down into the credit stack? So if we have a property obviously you have, you have the primary lender on that property. Typically you have equity investors, those LP investors a lot of times at the top. Where, where does private credit fit in? And, and why would this even be a, a portion of the credit stack? What's appealing to an operator?
So, so the credit will come in either usually as, as a. They can come in as a senior lender. We've done that so so you may come. We've come in as a senior lender for bridge where okay closing date. They couldn't meet the closing date so the, the seller refused to budge on the closing date that but, but their primary lender couldn't get it done in time. So we made a 60 day loan, you know and we made I don't know, you know crazy level of return on 60 days got taken out. So we are the senior. But then there's another level called mezz, a second lien. It's like, like a HELOC or second mortgage. And a lot of times this is filling the gap. So purchasing, for example, a lot of purchases today because interest rates are low in the past, they're doing agency assumptions. So you may, you can buy an apartment complex that has a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac debt in place. That debt may be at 3% or 4% and it's assumable by the new borrower.
Yeah.
And so everyone wants to jump through that. But what happens is it comes at a lower LTV. You may only be levered 50%, which makes it a really lousy. It's a great interest rate, but it makes it a lousy investment because you need a little bit more leverage to get to get decent returns. So they'll come and put a little mezzanine piece in there. Or preferred equity, which is like this cross between debt and equity. But it really is more like it's equity, but it's, it acts more like debt.
Yes.
And, and so what happens in these debt positions, if there's a liquidation, the first guy to get paid is the senior lender, the next guy to go, and he gets paid every dime before anyone gets anything. Then you get the mezzanine lender who gets paid every dime before anybody above them gets anything. Then you got the prep equity. It's everything, every dime before any of the common gets equity. So usually a common investor. Common equity investor is number two, three or four person to get paid. And now that's good. If everything is the moonshot worked, you're making all the profits. Right. And all the lenders are just getting their little piddly, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12%, whatever their number is. Oh, they're getting. And you made the 100%, you know, but, but it works the other way too, right?
Right.
If the deal doesn't go good, the lenders get all their money and you get nothing. Like you could get wiped. And we're seeing that now. So we've done private credit deals right now where the timelines are getting long. These development deals, we're going to end up making more money than the common equity guys, you know, because it's just debt, it just keeps compounding.
Yes. Yeah. And then one of the things that we've also seen in this market is as interest rates have increased, we've actually seen the spread decrease between, like you said that that middle portion that mezzanine debt or that preferred equity that's in there and the common equity investors. So the risk has actually gone up and the returns have come down to a degree.
That's right.
It's a real sweet spot in the market where we are today, you know.
And we haven't mentioned, but the other superpower for private credit is liquidity. So the bane of private alts, and the reason a lot of people stay away from them is because they're not liquid. Right? You send your money off, you may be stuck five to, you know, three to five years in an apartment complex or something and maybe longer if the market turns against you and people are afraid of that. But most private credit has liquidity provisions. You know, in our, in our funds we have a, we have a big hundred million dollar private credit fund that does, it has 1,000 mortgages in it. Thousand. Well, we have 50 to 60 payoff every quarter. So you want your money back, just declare it. Just declare a redemption. And we've never failed. Now that doesn't mean, you know, is there's a scenario where we, where we, we couldn't. But, but we have never yet in 13 years of running this. And so, so is another big thing that makes private credit very unique. So, so, so you see with the, it's like having a Lego set, right? You got this, you get this, you know, this real estate that does ABC and you got the private credit of this def. And you can put this together to construct exactly what you need at the risk levels you want to.
That's terrific. And that is, that is a big difference between the billionaires. And when the stock market goes down, they say, hey, this is great, we can reallocate some into that and take advantage of the reduced prices. And same thing with real estate that's happening today. And if you have a well balanced portfolio, certain areas are going to perform. And that's one of the big things I've seen, Bob, is as I talked to investors over the past couple of years when the stock market was tanking in 2022, investors wanted to pile money into real estate that was skyrocketing as the, as the stock market has now gone up tremendously here over the past few years, investors say, oh, I don't want to take money out of the stock market. It's doing great. But if you have this well balanced portfolio, you can rebalance and tell us about how the billionaires handle that versus just letting money ride in one asset class.
Yeah, Chris, but rebalancing is absolutely critical. So I have a bunch of data in the book that shows how investors are just blockheads we are of our emotional wiring. And just like you said, you know, you know, I'll tell a funny story. I ran, I ran a hedge fund for a while as a, as a stock market trader. My best timing indicator pinged market tops and bottoms. You know what? It was my mother. So mom, mom would call and bob, back up the truck, buy everything. Right now it's only going up. And I'd say thank you so much, much mom.
So, so, so, so, so, yeah, yeah.
And then she would say get out of the market. Bail, bail quick. It's all going down. And that's the thank you so much mom. I buy. And, and that's a funny story. It's actually a true story. But it's, it's. The problem is whatever is going on is not going to continue. And when, when everybody is bullish, then who is left to buy more? That's right, right. No one. They've already bought. When everybody is, when everybody is bearish, who's left to sell off? No one. Everybody's sold. Everybody's going to sell. So and so what happens is the market always reverses on sentiment. And so your sentiment is your worst enemy, your mindset. And I go through all these mindsets in the book. But, but one of the way to beat this is rebalancing. So if you had a, your stock market years took off, the last two years have been record breaking in the stock market. You know, 25 return unheard of back to back years by the way. The chances of that happening again are virtually nil. But, but it did well now your stock market is good. Well what happens is rebalance. You're going to be selling off some of that portfolio and putting into stuff that you're under allocated in. And so rebalancing makes you buy low and sell high.
Yes.
And it forces you to do it and yeah, no one wants to do it. And it's why, you know, so under reading books like this is real important because it gets it in your head. It's like I love reading health books and diet books because it reminds me to, you know, not eat the crap.
I see you got your whoop band on it. I think if I saw that flops right.
You know, remember to go against my emotional wiring.
Yes. Yeah. And that's one of my favorite indicators. It's a quarterly survey that's done by investors and it's one of the number one correlated indicators of performance. It's inversely correlated. The higher percentage that investors allocate to stocks, the lower the future returns and the lower amount that's allocated, the higher the future returns.
Exactly.
And yeah, one of my professors getting my mba, he talked all about investor. I forget what his class was but it was talking about the emotions of investors and that was his whole science. Bob as we wrap up here today, I know listeners are saying, well Bob, what do you see coming? So we see stock market at record highs. We see gold skyrocketing, we see some potential worry in terms of the currency markets out there. What are your thoughts on that? But also, you know, energy and AI I want to ask you that because we see a tremendous need in the energy space with AI. So any, any thoughts you can share on those two?
Well, open up about 50 cans of, of, of, you know, information there. I don't know where.
Well, we'll have to have you back on. We'll have to do a second episode, part B with Bob.
Yeah, I, I mean I think just the stock market again I've, I am a true data nerd and a finance nerd and if you plot the valuations against 10 future returns you can see right. I mean it's just this, it's just reverse correlation, you can see, right we're at, and basically the market is predicting right, right now if history holds about 0% returns in the stock market for the next 10 years now it could have another record breaking year. But I don't think it's going to, I mean the, you know, right now the valuations are higher. They were higher than they were at the peak of the dot com era. And that's what happens when you have, you know, the Internet age was truly revolutionary, so is the AI age and investors get over exuberant and it doesn't, because it's a great technology doesn't mean great investment. Right. So I think the stock market is probably going to be very volatile and go nowhere. I think interest rates are going to remain high, higher longer and I've been saying that for several years. I think inflation is going to be stickier than people want for several reasons. You know, first is the bond market that people don't realize we have. So you know the bond market, interest rates are set at auction. In the bond market, long rates are short, rates are set by the Fed long set at auction. And it's a supply and demand, right. So but if you look at supply of treasuries at auction, it's six fold higher than it was prior to the great financial Crisis. Why? Because of all the government deficits. So supply we're selling at auction is six times more stuff to sell than has ever been sold before. What's going to happen is the prices have to rise to attract investors. Prices have to fall to attract investors. Sorry. Which means yields rise. And so I think we have a systemic problem with this. Added to wage inflation, we have a, we have a worker shortage that is systemic. It's not cyclical. It is structural. And that's because of aging demographics. And so again, we're going to see wages continue to be, to accelerate and wages are leading the inflation indexes. So, so there are a lot of reasons. I see higher inflation, higher rates. You know, I don't think, I mean, I've been in the gold market forever. I've made a lot of money in gold, you know, but gold is, don't put, trust me, please don't put all your money in gold.
Right. It's a good portion of.
Mostly.
Yeah. Little hedge is not bad.
Yeah, fine. And it's great to look at, you know, but, and you know, but it's shouldn't be core and it doesn't mean the world's collapsing. It just means it's having its cycle after being, being comatose for, you know, decade and a half, you know, so it's just go, it's just doing its thing, right. And then it'll disappoint everybody and crash and rob everybody of their, you know, their exuberance. So, you know, I've been, I've been through multiple gold cycles.
So I don't, I remember, I remember the last one because we got married in September of 2006 and the guy that was in the gold market was buying everybody drinks. And I was like, this is before the, before we started buying drinks at the wedding. And I was like, what do you do? He's like, oh, we run a gold fund. I was like, oh, interesting. So I'll never forget that last, that last top in there. But Bob, we're going to have you back here in the next quarter. We're going to talk about what do you see in the macroeconomic cycle. But I want to be sure everybody has the link here. You can get Invest Like a Billionaire your new book on Amazon.com. you can also check out our credit fund. You can click on the Invest link@next levelincome.com if you want to learn more about that and our partnership with Aspen funds. Bob, what's the best way for listeners to find out more about aspen funds and stay in touch with you all.
Aspen Funds us.
Perfect. We got that in the show notes as well. Bob, always a pleasure talking to you my friend. Thank you so much for your time and sharing your wisdom with our audience today.
Great to be here and best to all your listeners.
Wonderful. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to gift you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome.com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.










