Ep. 80 - Shana Orczyk Sissel on Mastering Alternatives in Modern Investing

Welcome to the latest episode of the "No BS Wealth Podcast," where we delve into the world of alternative investments with industry expert Shana Orczyk Sissel. In this enlightening session, Shana, the CEO of Banrion Capital Management, shares her insights on the expansive universe of alternative investments. From hedge funds to real estate and beyond, learn how alternatives can diversify and strengthen your investment portfolio.

Discover more about Shana and her work at Banrion Capital by visiting Banrion Capital. Shana is also active on LinkedIn; connect with her to follow her latest updates at Shana's LinkedIn.

In this episode, Shana also discusses the misconceptions and opportunities within the alternative investment space. Whether you're an investor looking to broaden your horizons or an advisor eager to expand your offerings, this episode is packed with valuable information. Check out Shana’s personal insights and additional resources on her website at Shana Sissel.

For more insightful episodes on alternative investments, don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast on What's The Alternative? and The Alternative Mason.

Engage with us on social media and share your thoughts on this episode. Follow Shana on Instagram at Finance Queen 2020 and on Twitter at Shana's Twitter.

Follow our Host, Stoy Hall:
Twitter, FaceBook, Instagram, Tiktok, Linkedin

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Business Update
• 1:05 Integration with Mammoth Technology
• 4:07 Growth and Changes in the Alternative Space
• 8:25 Challenges with Reporting and Custodian Platforms
• 9:24 The Need for a Diversifying Alts Bucket
• 15:46 Allocating to Alternative Investments
• 22:10 Next Steps for Advisors and Clients
• 32:02 Promoting the Platform and Collaboration in the Industry

Transcript

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 0:04

Mhm. It's been

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 0:14

a long year since we've had this amazing bad ass woman back on the show and with Banrion capital as well, and it's diving into alternative investments. If you want to learn about her business in detail and who she is, we'll have this episode or that episode in the description below. But today we really want to dive into a couple of things. One, what the hell? Has been going on over the last year to what you've seen in the alternative space over the last year. And then we'll get to some hot topics or spicy items that really can apply to both us as advisors, but also for our everyday consumer. So welcome back. What the hell's been going on for last year?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 0:52

What a loaded question that is, personally and professionally, like a lot it's funny because I think sometimes we think a year's not that long and then you look back at what happened during a year and you're like, holy crap, a lot can change in a year. So when we first talked, I had just launched Bonroon. We, I don't even know if I had employees at that point. Definitely didn't have a tech platform. I moved I broke my back. It's a lot happened. Just a couple things. A lot. Yeah. Just, that was just at the end of the year. So a lot has happened. Bondian has grown a ton. We've developed our technology platform. It's completed and done. We inter did an integration, a technology integration with a firm called Mammoth Technology, who's our partner. Jen Mackerel from Mammoth is, I'm sure you might know him. He's a Fintwit regular. I met him at a conference two years ago. And then last spring he sent me a message. He said, you're still doing the alt thing. And I said, yeah, he's look, I am working, in one of the managing partners and one of the founders of this firm called Mammoth Technology. We have this great operational and compliance. Technology platform, but every advisor we talked to and the asset managers have these additional needs that they would really like to have all encompassing. And you do that. And then I was like we don't do the other part of this could be like, really cool because their solution, our solution put together. Ends up being like a really robust and complete solution that doesn't exist on the market right now. So we completed our integration with Mammoth in January. We had one small bug that will be resolved this Friday and we'll start onboarding advisors hopefully in the next 30 to 60 days. I'm going to just toot my own horn here or not even toot my own horn, but do a little self promotion. If you're an advisor, we're looking to have 10 beta users folks who are willing to come on and use the platform and help us make sure that it's working correctly and give us feedback to make sure that everything we say we do. And we do it well and so those beta users are really critical to our success. And we would love to have advisors if you're out there and you want to learn more, please reach out because we have 3, possibly 5 beta users. But we have, we want 10 to really get a good mix of feedback. So if you're out there and you want to check out what we built, we can talk about it more, of course. But give me a call.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 3:19

Give her a call. Give us a call. We'll get you connected. Absolutely. Cause the beta is very important. And I, and we had talked about, I wish my firm was designed to do that right now, because we've, again, this whole topic is the alt space and what you are doing. Now with mammoth technologies as well is providing that seamless route for us as advisors, not only to offer to our end users and clients, but ultimately gets them the exposure that we've all wanted and needed for literally ever. But now we're really hitting home with that. So bravo to you on that. I know that's been a long time coming. And like you had said a year ago, you had no staff and now you're up to how much staff?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 4:01

Four, two full time employees and an intern

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 4:05

see growing and moving and that is fantastic. So over this year of your own business development, but in just in general, in the all space industry, what have you seen change and adapt? What do you think is still lagging?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 4:22

So You know, we definitely see demand continues to grow in the space. We just signed Simplify Asset Management. They do some they do custom ETF models that include their alternative ETFs, and they're up to over 3 billion. They've grown almost a billion dollars in the last six months because there's so much demand. For what they're doing, and this idea of incorporating alts, I think advisors generally see that if they want to be able to compete for larger clients they really need to be able to compete in a space that alternatives are, a given and easily accessible through the larger private wealth and private banks. And I think generally speaking, a lot of clients would prefer to have a more independent advisor. So there's demand for sure from clients and now there's demand from advisors, that's the biggest thing we're seeing is just the accessibility and the demand is continues to grow. We've been saying it for a long time, but I'm actually seeing it for the first time ever, even though I had been hearing that this was the case. Maybe it is because now I actually have. A solution for advisors. But even when I was an advisor and was a CIO at an aggregator and was looking at some of the competition that's out there I didn't see I really wasn't hearing from other advisors that this was important to them. But now I hear it all the time.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 5:44

Yeah. Which means one thing it's being pushed from clients, right? Advisors don't rarely do we as a whole create something to push down. Usually it's because our clients are saying, Hey, I want this, or I've seen this and I want to make it happen. So that's fantastic that you're seeing that movement. Because we all know it's coming. We've seen it. We've talked about it now that they have exposure and access to it. It's phenomenal. What's lagging though? What's still not good enough in that space?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 6:12

I'd like to think that what we built solves for a lot of this, but I can tell you that the legacy providers that help advisors and their clients access alternatives, or even for their retail investor to be able to access alternatives are quite limited. On the retail side, like the pure direct retail solutions are very closed and don't have a ton of options. So those are the firms like Yieldstreet, which probably does the best job in my opinion of direct retail exposure. But you look at things like Sweater BC and some other firms like that. It's all well and good, but it's very narrow and it's hard for clients to find these things. And once you get there, like now you have 8 million different statements, nothing is in one place. And if you have an advisor, it gets even more complicated. The other problem is, I think that the legacy solutions that are out there We're built by institutional investors that came from the alt space that saw an opportunity to grow and take share in the area and the advisor market, but they're not built by advisors. So they really come and focus on access, right? Let's get as much access as possible. So if that means setting up feeder products and special purpose vehicles so that we can have lower minimums. Great. Let's try to get, some private equity on here, private debt. And let's just make it about the access. Oh, advisors push back. We want more options. Okay. We'll build a marketplace, right? Oh, we want due diligence. Okay. We'll bring due diligence in house or in the case of case, they outsource to Mercer, but that doesn't mean you can. We'll do it. It doesn't mean you're going to see it. And all of that's great. Then it was like how do I report on this? Oh, that's easy. We'll just set up an API with Orion or Tamarack or Black Diamond or Adapar or name, whoever. Great. Now you have a reporting data feed of performance information. And then it was we want to be on the custodian. So then Fidelity always had that set up. Schwab has now built an alt platform for alt managers to be able to custody at Schwab. Neither one of them are great. Every manager complains about them and just because it's there doesn't mean that it actually feeds the way that you think it will. I've had advisors really complain about the Schwab 1 in particular, although the Schwab 1 is easier for managers to get on. Fidelity requires that. For an alternative investment manager to get on their platform, they have to be referred by an advisor that uses them. So you can't just go to Fidelity and say, I want to be under platform. But yeah, so those are limitations and why I see this as a problem is if I'm an advisor and I'm sure you've dealt with this story, cause I alts. Once you allocate to a private fund, who gets the cap calls? Not you. Who gets the k1? Not you. Can you track it? Is there one portal you can go to find all of your stuff? Nope. That's the case. So when we built what we have. Oh, how easy is it to build? Good luck. So when we built our solution, we All that other stuff, all well and good. Let's look at okay, all that stuff was built. It's still not moving the needle. What will move the needle? All right. Here's the things that we thought would move the needle from our focus group with advisors, analytics that can incorporate public and privates in the same document. And normalize the return stream. I have these funky returns once daily, once monthly, once quarterly, normalize it. Right now you can optimize it. Now you can show portfolio snapshots and have everything in the same place. Let's make it so once the allocation is made, you can still be involved and earn your fee. So let's work with Mammoth, and this is what we did. When you make an investment in any of the products on the platform that incorporate with Mammoth, and here's the other thing, if you have products that aren't on the platform that you still want to incorporate, so you can have all this with Mammoth, You can hook those on. There's a data cost to set up the data feeds, but Mammoth will do that. Like you don't have to have it on the platform for us to be able to hook up the feed so you can get the information. Let's go and see all the clients. You have an alternative product that's hooked into Mammoth. How much capital is committed? How much capital has been called? When's the next cap call? Oh, you're going to get a notification. Just the client will get something, but so will you'll get a notification. We're going to set up a way for you to create a tickler so you know to raise cash so that cap call can be met. Know what? That's great for the advisor. That's great for the client. The manager loves that too.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 11:02

It's a win, right? Win

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 11:03

win. Yep. You can actually plan for that stuff, right? All right. Maybe you offer accounting services or you work with the CPA. Guess what? We have a document vault. The K 1 just goes there. You can make it that document vault accessible to the CPA, to the lawyer. And so you don't have to wait for your client to tell you they got it in the mail or they lost it, or you know how this thing works. I lose my tax documents constantly. They don't all come at one time. And then like, where did I put it? In my account, I should be more organized. Let's just,

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 11:34

We all should, let's be right.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 11:35

But the fact that it all goes in that one place, reporting, Great, we can streamline it into everybody else. We can auto fill and pre fill documents. We're one of the few platforms that doesn't require you to have a standardized subscription document as a manager. We will work with your document, which is great, right? You can monitor both the advisor and the manager can monitor where things are in the process. If you're an advisor who talks to a client about allocating to a certain alternative, you go in, you digitize the documentation, you pre fill the required information, review it, you do your suitability your ACML, all that kind of stuff. You do all that and then you send an email to the client for DocuSign. And then you don't hear from the client. So you open up client, open the email, started the doc, didn't finish it. So you can follow up. Manager can see advisor started filling out a document and ended at point C. Oh, I know that point C has some questions on there that maybe might've been confusing and they didn't know the answer to, I'm going to proactively call them and say, is there anything I can do to help? So you can do all that in our portal. And it allows for this really seamless, high quality, high service. Model and then because everything just completely, everything goes right into your back office solution. Now you can bill on it, whether or not you custody with the place that the fund custodies, which also the managers love. Cause again, most Schwab and fidelity require an advisor to refer you, right? So they can't just go there. So that means they have to have an advisor willing to invest in them when they don't custody with their clients. They're custodian and I tell managers all the time, this kind of solves that problem for you, at least in the beginning. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to get on fidelity and Schwab just to make your lives easier and the advisor's life easier. But this kind of solves that so that it doesn't actually make it that hard. To get an advisor on board because they can still get everything into their reporting and everything of that nature. We sought to really take the friction out as much as we possibly could. But the reason we were able to do that is because myself and the folks at mammoth and my team. We've all been advisors, so we all know how that business works, and we've spent a lot of time talking to advisors and asking the questions. The other big thing is, great, the average mass affluent advisor only has 30 percent of their book that's qualified. That means that 70 percent of their book isn't. So how do you give them alts? Because if I'm an advisor, I don't really want to have really different, complex difficult to understand portfolios for 10 clients. Who wants to do that? So that's why we created our model marketplace with our ETF and mutual fund models so that advisors can plug and play things in for everybody. And have lots of liquidity options. So whether you want, An evergreen private fund or some sort of capital call fund, like a private equity fund or an interval fund or an ETF or a tender offer, all of those are options on the platform. And that gives you an opportunity to sit down with a client and find out what's best for like their risk tolerance and their liquidity requirements. So we really sought to do everything we possibly could to provide like this really clean. Experience that's not so scary and makes everything easier

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 14:50

and you've done it, right? At least on paper. Obviously got baby. No, it's done. It's done.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 14:54

You should come and see a demo. Maybe you can't be a beta user, but you should at least see that what I'm saying is true. The advisors we've talked to that that have seen it have been blown away.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 15:04

And they should, because you've knocked down two walls. You've knocked down the wall of just it being a pain in the absolute ass for us to get a client to even agree and then go through all the paperwork, because that is usually step one in all set always as a pain in the ass because there's PPMs and there's a hundred different pages, right? But to simplify that makes it a lot easier specifically with DocuSign. Two on the flip side, then. Especially when you're talking about, like you had said, about 70 percent of your portfolio is going to be unqualified. The fact that they're able to then search and figure out different lengths of time allows you to customly build that portfolio on them, right? Majority of everyone in our space always says that every single alternative is something that's going to lock you into forever. It's costly and that's. It's very inaccurate. And we brought that up the last episode you're on is there's so many different types of alternative investments that have short term midterm, long term. You can pick and choose and you can adapt and change whatever portfolio you want. Ultimately, they just didn't have access and knowledge of what those are and you're providing that. So let's I'm going to bring up a question or an answer that you had last time we had asked what is the percentage of a portfolio that someone should allocate towards any type of vault just in general, right? And we had brought up the 20 percent should be standard for everybody. And then obviously more institutional, they're going to be 50 plus. Do you still stand at that number? Has that changed over the year with everything? I stand

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 16:36

at that number, but I also want to caveat that with I'm talking diversifying alts. So I just did, we have a web series called you're doing it all wrong. Six to 10 minute videos where we take on a myth and misconception related to this. Our latest episode is about are all alternative investments diversifying. And I would argue that is not true, right? Cause equity, whether it public or private is equity credit, whether it public or private is credit. The risks are the same. They have beta to each other. There's a reason you would want to be in the private side. It's a less efficient market. You can, in, in theory, get better returns. Sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's not. There's reasons you would want exposure to private markets and credit and equity. Those aren't diversifying, right? So I argue that's not part of that 20%. That's part of your, 60 percent you have an equity part of that, depending on the liquidity comfort of the client should go in private, right? I think it should be 20 to 25 percent diversifying all. And that's things like managed futures. Market neutral private real estate where you physically own the buildings. We have, we're bringing on a new client that has a sports rights fund. That is cool. And people love that. That is a diversifying alternative. These are things that do not correlate to the broader equity markets or fixed income markets. So the benefit they bring to your portfolio is meaningful in terms of risk management. So I think you should have 20 to 25 percent in diversifying. But you should probably have more than that because you should probably have a little bit of private equity in your equity allocation and a little bit of private debt in your fixed income allocation. Determining the size of those positions will depend largely on your client because those two areas are not overly liquid.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 18:32

Yeah, I think that's the best way to put it. Is in, really, that's our argument in general is we shouldn't be calling them alternative investments like it shouldn't be. It should be whatever their name is alternatives, right? Whether it's private or public and it's all based upon liquidity. That's what it truly is, because all of this should be in everyone's portfolio, right? It's just a matter of how you want to design that and what tool comes into play. Because I believe,

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 18:57

yeah we've gotten so trained this 60, 40 model, and everything fits into their little buckets. And then you put in things like managed futures, global macro market neutral, like that doesn't fit nicely into those little bucks, private equity and private debt, totally do. They totally fit nicely into those buckets, but you have all these other things around the edges that are really like important risk management tools. Where do they go? So then I would argue you need to have another bucket and you can call it alt. You can call it, I know Orion calls theirs diversifiers. Everybody calls it something different. I used to call it the alpha bucket when I first started doing it this way in 2008, in my opinion, you gotta have another bucket cause it's. I think it's too hard to try to explain why it would fit in X, Y, or Z. And it does play a completely different role in the portfolio than those other two buckets.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 19:52

Yeah, that's the thing. It can play, it's an entirely different role.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 19:55

Yep.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 19:55

But also a role that isn't talked about as much, right? Because everyone thinks diversified, I'll just diversify upon different types of equities and debts. To your point, that's not really diversifying. Because they're correlated at some juncture somewhere. The diversified side comes from this other bucket, whatever you want to call it. That's what that bucket's for.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 20:16

Whatever makes it comfortable. I think diversifying bucket is probably the easiest one for clients to like intuitively understand. Correct.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 20:24

Yeah. You can call it your

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 20:24

risk management bucket, whatever you want to call it. But the goal here is put in there things that aren't correlated to the other two buckets.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 20:33

Absolutely. Absolutely. What have you found now more on the client side, talking with all these advisors, what are clients really asking for? And I don't mean from a tech side of things now, but like from an investment standpoint, what are you getting from these advisors that clients are like moving towards in our economy where we're at right now?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 20:53

So I think the thing that clients have gotten, you have the most questions about and start the conversation is. The idea of venture capital. We've had this really robust technology. You see these IPOs come out on CNBC. You have people talking about venture, you have people talking about private equity all the time, and they see that, right? You have firms like Sweater V, vc coming out and talking about you have invest X. Is it invest X? Yes. Invest X, which is a platform that allows you to invest in private companies. We just signed a client web street that allows investors to invest in private companies that are in the e commerce space. It has a ton of cashflow and you can see the underlying company directly that you're invested in. It's VC ish, but very specialized on e commerce because of the cash flows. That is what gets clients excited. Cause it's sexy. But that starts the conversation. Other things that I don't think clients know you can invest in. I like to call them the passion investing. I actually think from an advisor standpoint, it's actually the most efficient way to introduce us to your client is matching. Their investment idea with something, your client's passionate about I mentioned sports rights because that gets people excited when we tell advisors, we're bringing on a sports rights fund. They get excited because that means they can now have a fractional ownership in their favorite sports team. Sports rights fund for those who aren't familiar is fractional ownership interest in professional sports teams. And so if you're a Bulls fan, there's a fractional. Now you can say I own the Bulls because you do, right? And people love sports. They're passionate about it. They get excited about it. There's a reason that's a trillion dollar industry, right? It's a reason why the NFL has, the ratings it does and people are interested in it. Like even in the off season, like in between, like when Super Bowl happens in the draft. People care. There's a reason sports radio exists. People care. And I don't know that a lot of clients know that they can invest in it. And that gets them excited. And that's an easy layup. For an advisor to start talking about private funds and because it is passion related, those issues of liquidity tend not to come up as much. That's not the thing they want to sell because they're too excited to tell people they own the bulls. They're not going to sell it. Like no matter what happens, they can't take away their bragging rights. But there's other things like that. So for example, there are wine funds where you can invest in vineyards. There's one that we've been talking to for a little bit of time where you can actually go and you invest in the fund and because you are an investor in the fund they send you the best vintage from every vineyard of the year. At the end of the year. So right around the holidays, you get a nice case of wine. And you get to tell people that's your wine. You own that vineyard,

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 23:52

right?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 23:52

This is my vineyards, my wine, and you get to say that and people are passionate about wine. And there's, baseball cards, antiques, cars, all of that stuff, those are actually more prevalent than people realize. And there are things that really connect with your client also helps you get to know your client better. Ask the question what gets you excited? What's your hobbies and then find investments. We're actually talking to a firm right now. That's doing that with horses. Fractional interest in the Derby course, fractional interest in our Grand Prix Olympic course. It's amazing. And a lot of that has to do with the evolution of the blockchain and digitization. And you want to go, we can talk crypto. Crypto falls in this space. And so there's a lot of things to be excited about. And as advisors, if you ask the right questions, you're These are things that are going to get your clients so excited and it's going to deepen your relationship. It could possibly get you a lot more assets too. And I guarantee you the big investment banks and private wealth firms that they're dealing with aren't talking about these passion things. They get, they like to try to sell you that they're, they know Blackstone or they have a relationship with Carlisle and that's fine. But I also like to remind advisors, if it got downstream to you, there's a reason. It's because the institutional marketplace didn't oversubscribe and they have, capacity left

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 25:19

and they need to sell it to somebody. So if it got down to you, probably a reason. Absolutely. And I, the passion part, and I really wanted us to hone in and land on that one too, because it changes this whole dynamic when we talk about investments, right? Everyone talks about investments is always focused on the return, and always beat the market where our actual clientele base. Is not ever really screaming that part right screaming. I want to invest in things. I want to invest in right? Which is really all that matters ultimately at the end of the day as long as obviously we're not gonna give him a shit product And lose them home. Let's be real.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 26:01

Yeah, you don't want to lose money for your client But I always say this and I know this is exactly where you're going Client doesn't care if you outperform the market as long as they met their goal, right? Because you're helping them meet goals,

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 26:12

right?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 26:12

You're not like you're, when your client comes to, to work with you, they don't say I want to work with you because I want you to beat the market by 20%. Has that ever happened in the history of the world? No, they come to you and say, I am planning for retirement. I am planning. Cause I want to buy a house. I would like to save money for X, Y, Z. This is my dream. This is my goal. Your goal your job as an advisor is to get them to the finish line. They do not care if you beat the bogey by 20 percent or 30 percent or 10 percent or 5%. That's nice. They do care if you miss the bogey.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 26:47

They do

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 26:47

care a lot. If you miss the bogey. You will get way worse feedback for missing the bogey than you will get good feedback for beating it.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 26:58

It's true unless and I'll put a caveat to that unless they're investing in things that they care about and they know that things That happen for example, if we were going to say the bulls, you know We'll use that as an example if they have a really few shitty years in a row It's probably not going to perform very well, and they know that, right? That's a different understanding, but you're

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 27:19

still on the ball on the

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 27:21

bowls, right? You still tell

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 27:23

your guys at the golf course that you own the bowls or the ladies in your yoga class that you have your own wine. Come over, ladies. We'll have a wine night. I just got my my case of my wine, right? Let's not pretend these things aren't like things we want. We want to be able to brag to our friends about this stuff.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 27:43

And we know, over time, those things just keep going up in value. Let's be real. It doesn't matter how bad a sports team has been, it's still going up in value. Shit, look at the Carolina Panthers. They're just trash. How much do the

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 27:57

commanders just get sold for and they're awful?

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 27:59

Yeah, they're terrible. What was it? It was a few billion. It was like three billion more than they just sold for Within the last I think decade or two

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 28:08

right and they're

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 28:09

awful

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 28:09

and they're not only are they awful But like the operational team there was in a whole bunch of lawsuits and all kinds of others. They still Sold for a ridiculous amount of money

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 28:20

and they always will because sports and those passion projects We'll never go away because that's what the things that we want and we care about.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 28:27

And a lot of those ownership the folks who own those teams have realized that they can monetize beyond the team. Like I'm from Boston. A lot of people know that I grew up in Massachusetts. Robert Kraft, if you go down to a Patriot place, it's There's a stadium, but there's a massive entertainment complex with restaurants and shops and Patriot themed things and, like, all year round, they can charge for parking and get people in the area and make money. And it's not just about the team anymore, being able to sell jerseys and any sort of memorabilia, like, all those things matter. There's NFTs now in sports, nBA Hotshot was the thing that kind of got NFTs on the map, right? All that stuff. There's ways to monetize. So to your point, like even if your team is awful, it doesn't change that there's still a fan base. It's not like the fans go away. I know a lot of people who are fans of teams that suck, right? Don't you like, cause it's your team.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 29:22

Talk about it. I'm a Falcons fan, so I get it. You're Patriots. They haven't been good in a few years.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 29:26

Stop it. They were good. I am not allowed to complain about the Patriots having a few bad years. You're not. We had 20 plus amazing years where we dominated everything and went to the Super Bowl and won it like six times. And 28 to three.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 29:40

Yeah. You deserve a good decade and a half of just failure, so it's fine.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 29:43

That we're not gonna have a decade and a half.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 29:45

It's fine. It's fine. And 28 to three. Got you. I we're gonna, we're just gonna ski all past that, that you're, yeah, we're gonna go past that.'cause then I'm gonna have to drive to Chicago and, I don't. Anyways, back to it. We got everyone excited about their passion projects. We got everyone excited about being able to invest in things that they actually want to invest in. Yes. If they're listening right now and they're very excited. What is their next step in order to do this?

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 30:12

Talk to your advisor and advisors. Talk to your clients. I know that there's a mix in the audience for your show. But I say advisors, it's in your best interest to start to talk to clients about this. If they have to come to you, you've already failed at your job. So be proactive. Like we built our platform with the intention of being proactive. We not only offer like this great curated list of strategies that we've vetted the managers. They've been operationally vetted by us by Alphabot before they even get on the platform. We do all the due diligence and we make it readily available to you. That's all well and good. But when you log in for the first time, you don't see any of that. You see a newsfeed and you see a newsfeed full of educational content. Sales ideas. We call them storyboards. You see the manager's latest newsletter. This is our latest DDQ. Hey, we just added this partner. Here's our latest episode of our podcast. Here's a partner on a podcast. That's not us, but that we want you to see we are in the process of finalizing a deal with one of the biggest and most popular research, like economic research firms that will make not all, but a good chunk of their research available to any advisor. In our, on our platform now, if the advisor went to go to that particular firm themselves, it would cost them 30, 000 a year. Like you get all of that. And when you log in, that's the first thing you see that way. You, these ideas are in front of you and not you thinking like reactively to a client coming to you. Now we're going to help you have more proactive conversations and do the things that are going to help you grow your business. Because again, I say it again, if. The client had to come to you. You've already failed.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 31:54

If the client has come to you already, you have failed. You have failed your client. It is now time to get on that platform. It is now time to be able to come to your clients with all of those ideas. Cause you know who they are. You know what they love. Now let's build their actual investments around them and not some cookie cutter bullshit, 60, 40 that we've been trained on for years. So I appreciate it. I cannot wait to do the demo myself, get on the platform when we're ready and get this thing rolling, applaud to you and your bad ass team. Of course, always for doing what you're doing. And we look forward to seeing even more of it.

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 32:31

And I want to just plug you did an episode of the alternative Mason with our chief of staff, Brittany Mason playing her last name. And we're really excited. That's going to come out in the next a couple of weeks. And we're Promoting that as well. Stoy has some great insights that he offers through that particular podcast. So be on the lookout for that episode coming soon.

Stoy Hall, CFP®: 32:52

And if you can't tell we're all one giant family and love each other. So we're always going to promote the shit out of each other. That is

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 32:58

totally true. We, that's one of the things that I love the most about Fintwit and having met so many great people here. We just promote the crap out of each other. It is not competitive at all. It's all about helping each other out. And, as I was growing my business, I want to just thank my friends from Fintwit. It's folks like yourself, folks like Phil Bach, like Judd Mackerel that got us to like Jason Trennett over at Strategas and Dan Clifton over at Strategas and Adam Barbell over at Strategas, those folks. That, we're willing to like, give us a shot. Matt Hogan at Bitwise willing to like, take a look at this little startup because they want to see us succeed and then go out and talk about it. And, it is one big loving family. And I don't think people really appreciate how valuable that is and how much we want to support each other and each other's businesses.

Black Mammoth: 33:48

Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you again for your time. Thank

Shana Orczyk Sissel, CAIA: 33:51

you.

Black Mammoth: 33:51

The proceeding program was sponsored by Black Mammoth. Any awards, rankings, or recognition by unaffiliated third parties or publications are in no way indicative of the advisor's future performance or any individual client's investment success. No award ranking or recognition should be construed as a current or past endorsement of black mammoth. Information regarding specific awards, rankings, or recognitions is available on the Black Mammoth website, www.black mammoth.com. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. Investment strategies such as asset allocation, diversification, or rebalancing do not assure or guarantee better performance and cannot eliminate the risk of investment losses. There are no guarantees that a portfolio employing these or any other strategy will outperform a portfolio that does not engage in such strategies. This broadcast should not be construed by any client or prospective client as a solicitation to affect or attempt to affect transactions and securities or the rendering of personalized investment advice due to various factors including changing market conditions. The information discussed in this broadcast may no longer be reflective of current positions or recommendations. While information presented is believed to be factual and up to date, Black Mammoth do not guarantee its accuracy, and it should not be regarded as a complete analysis of the subjects discussed. The tax and estate planning information discussed is general in nature, and is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal or tax advice. Listeners should consult an attorney or tax professional regarding their specific legal or tax situation. Past performance is not indicative of future results.