Lead-Lag Live

Michelle Connell on Alternative Investment Strategies, Small-Cap Market Insights, and the Art of Financial Storytelling

• Michael A. Gayed, CFA

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Explore the fascinating world of investment with us as we journey through shifting market sentiments and opportunities. Our special guest, Michelle Connell, brings a wealth of knowledge from her diverse career, spanning museum management to leading roles in the tech sector and private equity. Discover how Michelle navigates the complexities of alternative investments, focusing on enhancing portfolios for foundations, charities, and high-net-worth individuals. Her unique perspective offers invaluable insights into the evolving landscape of modern finance.

Venture into the intricacies of the small-cap market and the challenges it presents amidst speculation and market euphoria. Drawing parallels to the early 2000s, we stress the significance of discernment and thorough analysis to separate valuable options from market "junk." Our discussion extends to the private credit space, where we delve into its potential benefits and risks, particularly emphasizing the importance of manager selection and understanding default rates. The episode also explores the nuances of serving institutional clients, where unique strategies are crucial to effectively meet their complex needs.

Embrace the importance of financial advisors and the potential pitfalls of managing investments independently. Through personal anecdotes, including an unforgettable meet with Steve Jobs, we illustrate key investment lessons and the power of storytelling in financial education. You'll also get a sneak peek into an upcoming book that blends humor with practical advice, aiming to engage and inform. Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting, this episode promises to offer insights that are both enlightening and entertaining.

The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax, or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions.

 Sign up to The Lead-Lag Report on Substack and get 30% off the annual subscription today by visiting http://theleadlag.report/leadlaglive.


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Speaker 1:

I think the difference may be now the sentiment overall, I think, with retail as well as the brokerage side. I don't think a lot of people own small cap. Everybody's holding on to the largest tech stocks that are available. At the same time, Maybe they're doing a barbell approach. Now they're doing the Magnificent Seven and they're doing a barbell approach. Now they're doing the Magnificent Seven and they're doing Bitcoin. So the one thing it has in common to 2000 is just the mass euphoria and we're to the point of speculation where people are. Well, I'll just put my money in an index and I'll be great until it's not.

Speaker 2:

I'm looking forward to this conversation. I've actually known Michelle for two years three years, I want to say, I can't even feel time at this point and she's got a great background, great story story, and I think it's good to have somebody who really knows the alt space uh for the show, because it is an area that I think is going to become increasingly important. So, all that said, my name is michael guy at publisher of the lead lag report. Join me for 50 minutes roughly as michelle connell uh making her debut, but you've also been doing the podcast thing for a little bit of time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

So, for those who are watching and are not familiar with who you are, what's your background? What have you done throughout your career? What are you doing currently?

Speaker 1:

Let's see, I've been in the industry probably 25 years, always fascinated with stocks, probably like Michael, and that's what got me into the field. With stocks probably like Michael, and that's what got me into the field I got my CFA and, after my CFA, took a museum out of bankruptcy, I've had an interesting career, trying to zig and zag and get the experience that I wanted From there. I worked at a small cap shop in Southern California, became the semiconductor analyst and then moved to one of the nation's largest banks, was a tech sector head, from there, went to a private equity and private credit shop in Chicago that was bought out at the bottom of the mortgage crisis in 2008, 2009. Ended up in Texas, had to start my own shop because there aren't a lot of people with my background in this part of the world, and I've had my own firm, portia Capital, for eight years.

Speaker 1:

Focus is on foundations and charities, because that's my love and my sweet spot, but we also do a lot with high net worth individuals. Where we are different is we're able to allocate to alternative investments. I'd say on average, most portfolios have about if they're qualified anyway have 20 to 30%, and I go from anything from liquid alternatives all the way to doing the due diligence on ai biotech. Uh, let's see bc seed capital do a lot of fun stuff. That's a fun part of my job, breaking apart investments and seeing where where they'll work.

Speaker 2:

Speaking of the word fun, of those different career paths semiconductor analysts, small cap, private equity which was the most fun.

Speaker 1:

Well, first of all, the first job out of grad school taking a museum out of bankruptcy knew nothing about that world and while I was handling the operations the finance side and taking them out of bankruptcy and giving them a budget and working and finding insurance for dinosaurs and exhibits and bringing that stuff in and handling their endowments lot of really cool things that most people in our world don't get a chance to do but at that point there wasn't a job in investments on the West Coast. It was during the defense recession. So you create your own spot, right, michael?

Speaker 2:

I am nothing if I am not always trying to create opportunities. I think that's certainly that's part of the entrepreneurial bug. I think opportunities, I think that's that's certainly that's part of the entrepreneurial bug. I think that you and I both have. There you go.

Speaker 1:

I will say from that museum position, I did go on and work for one of the managers that we allocated to Now. It was a small cap experience, so again, finding your way.

Speaker 2:

And what were the? What were the years on the small cap side?

Speaker 1:

Oh my God, that's got to be about 2000.

Speaker 2:

In 2000.

Speaker 1:

Okay interesting.

Speaker 2:

That was actually a time when small caps did outperform large caps by just being down less, and obviously everyone was focused on tech bubble at the time. I'm curious take me back to that time period. As the bear markets unfolding and the NASDAQ bubbles popping, did you find it harder to analyze small cap companies which are still co-moving with the broader market?

Speaker 1:

It wasn't hard, given the backgrounds that you and I have being CFAs.

Speaker 1:

What was difficult was getting management not to buy into this fallacy that everything was going up, and it wasn't a situation where you had, like, we have now a lot of AI companies that are making solid cashflow, but you had a lot of junk out there, right. But I remember the head of private banking who was not happy with me, and the head of value management because we wouldn't buy the crap. We underweighted the sector and we still lost money, but we didn't lose as much. But it was an ongoing battle, michael, because the clients, the brokers, they all wanted anything that was tech related. So you really had to be strong and say, no, I'm not going to own something, somethingcom, and I'm just. There was a lot of a lot of junk out at that time. So, as you weren't around at that time, probably, but it was a good background, right, because it gives you the ability to look at different parts of the market cycle, especially with technology, and know what's going to work, whether it's a uh, a stock or an investment, private investment I like that.

Speaker 2:

You said you had to go through sort of looking past a lot of the junk back then, um, in the small cap space, because there's also a lot of junk now in the small cap space. Any parallels at all to that period of 2000, 2002, when it comes to small caps in particular? Sort of the fundamental starting point or the sentiment or anything like that? I?

Speaker 1:

think the difference may be now the sentiment overall, I think, with retail as well as the brokerage side. I don't think a lot of people own small cap Everybody's you know holding on to the largest tech stocks that are available. At the same time, maybe they're doing a barbell approach. Now they're doing the Magnificent Seven and they're doing a barbell approach. Now they're doing the magnificent seven and they're doing Bitcoin.

Speaker 1:

So the one thing it has in common to 2000 is just the mass euphoria and we're to the point of speculation where people are well, I'll just put my money in an index and I'll be great until it's not, and people have very short memories, and I think that's where we are again. So I still be doing my homework. There's still a lot of good stuff out there, and especially on the small cap side, because you've got some discounts that haven't been available for years and people have just been sidestepping them, and a lot of takeover candidates and turnaround uh, I have a manager that that's all they focus on. They've done really well. It's possible, but you again, you have to.

Speaker 2:

You have to look at the spreadsheets and do your homework you mentioned private equity, um, and private equity back then I think was probably as hot as private credit is now. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the private credit space. There's some that argue that what's happened in the junk debt end of the bond market can be explained away somewhat by private credit, because the things which would otherwise be really junky in the public bond market space has just been hidden by the private credit space. So whatever is left on the public end is maybe just higher quality and the kind of crappier bond issuances are on the private side. Any thoughts on that? Because I think some managers do consider private credit alternative.

Speaker 1:

Depends on. Well, I call it alternative light, if you can get out of it with an interval fund right or actual alternative investment where you've got a holding period. I still like private credit, but you better know your manager. I mean, because look at how bonds have done, especially after the election. I mean it's. I think when I looked at the egg yesterday it's up maybe total return 2% the U S egg and that's just. That's not going to work for clients that are in the middle of getting distributions from their IRAs and that's definitely not going to work for foundations that those are my largest clients that need a 5% distribution. So I was doing private credit right, starting at the pandemic, found a really good manager, but they've been doing it, for it's a team that's been doing it for 30 years and they know how.

Speaker 1:

I've always said that equity excuse me, our fixed income analysts are smarter than equity analysts and I'm saying that as a former equity analyst because they cannot lose money and so they know that balance sheet better than any equity analyst does, because, again, the name of the game is not losing money. So find good quality managers that have been in it for a long time, strong team, very low default rate and I think you'll be okay. I think you can make a much better return on that side of your allocation. So I still like it. But yes, I agree with you. It's become, like you know, one of the topics that everybody talks about. Maybe it's a little bit too over talked about and everybody's going to that area, even the private equity guys, so they can make money in that. That probably will continue until we get some changes in regulation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and look, I mean clearly if you, if your audience is more on the foundation's institutional side of things, they're not going to care so much about illiquidity potential right which can hit the private credit space, whereas you know if you've got more of a retail base that's going to matter more and that's where you know risk could kind of manifest. Now I want to talk about that audience on the foundation side. First of all, I know that that is a very hard audience to crack. It's a hard client type to get. Yeah, it's a long lead time right to get foundations.

Speaker 1:

Usually I've got a very quick segue how I got that. It was pure done luck or maybe it was hard work. For about six years I mentored a group of finance students in a tiny little university in Louisiana, in the Bayou area of Louisiana like literally across the way they filmed swamp people and I took them to the CFA research challenge uh, north America finals a few times. And uh, we typically would be in the finals for the region, for the South, and that's not paid. And so you're teaching students that's not paid. And so you're teaching students, undergrad and grad, how to basically go to Wall Street and write up a stock. Because that's what you'd have to do. You'd have to write up a stock like you would at Goldman or JP Morgan, and then pitch your idea, idea in three to five minutes out of that 90 page document, document and it's tough.

Speaker 1:

And so, because I did that for six years, there is a foundation that was probably on their last legs and the board went to the finance guy at that university and said we need help. We're not going to be around for much longer. We just can't find advisors who are holding on to capital preservation for us. Can you manage our money? And he said I can't, but I know a woman who can, otherwise it wouldn't have happened, michael, because it is a very hard audience. So good deeds sometimes are rewarded, not punished.

Speaker 2:

I guess it depends on when.

Speaker 1:

It was a long six years doing that and flying in and flying out and mentoring.

Speaker 2:

Talk to me about how foundations typically look at investing versus a more retail audience. Obviously, timeframe is a big differentiator, but I get the sense that foundations in general are more open to alternatives than the foreign chasing retail.

Speaker 1:

It depends on the foundation. I would say if it's a foundation that's over $100 million, they're more sophisticated and they know alternative investments. If it's a smaller foundation and it's managed a lot of them in this part of the world anyway if there are less than $15 million, they're managed by retail brokers. I came into this particular large foundation. I built my firm around. There was an account at the brokerage firm that said alternative investments, michael, and it had an international stock fund mutual fund. That was their alternative investment. So it was an education process is what I'm trying to get to, because a lot of foundations that are smaller, like individuals, they haven't had that exposure literally if they think that international is going to be their alternatives.

Speaker 1:

So it was an education process and we started out, as you could probably guess, with private credits, things that were more liquid, things that were more liquid, and now we're investing in handheld I'm trying to think ultrasound devices that are powered by AI chips. We've done that. We're looking at investing in biotech out of Princeton that is also going to be generated with AI. A lot of really cool stuff that we've done. You know options that are vested for tech employees that they're not able to. They're not able to exercise because they can't pay their tax bill. I mean, some really pay their tax bill. I mean some really definitely niche alternative stuff, but it's a process to get any client used to that, and so it's taken eight years to probably get to a more sophisticated alternative allocation for them. Long story short, but we did start with private credit, as you probably would guess, and we have a lot of long discussions in terms of what we look at and what we invest in.

Speaker 2:

I love that point about the international being.

Speaker 1:

That was great. That was great. I remember opening up the account statement going huh.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, but I think that's a good segue into sort of properly defining what an alternative is. I am Like, personally, I don't believe long-short is alternative. Maybe I'm wrong, but if you look at long-short indices, they tend to track the long-only consumer staples ETF. The correlation is actually pretty high. It's just lower beta, right, and I also argue that a lot of alternatives are just disguised beta to some extent. So how do you properly think about what an alternative actually is?

Speaker 1:

Kind of comes down to a few things. First of all, what is a board comfortable with? Because, as they're seeing their alternative piece grow and grow and it's maybe getting beyond the long part of their bands in terms of what they allow, then you're going to have to break it down for them. Okay, this has liquidity in a quarter. I do have a long short fund that I've had for probably six years. It's done very well, except for this year, and I do break that out, michael, I break it out separately, I don't put it in with the longer dated stuff. So I think it depends on the client, their timeframe and also their risk aversion, because even if people or organizations have had allocation to something for a long period of time, get to another financial crisis, people's comfort level just dissipates really fast.

Speaker 2:

Cynically it seems to be an alternative is something that hopefully will not get you fired, right, because I think the dilemma is in these unrelenting passive markets, right In these unrelenting passive bull markets, alternatives will likely underperform. I mean, that's, that's simply what they do, I think.

Speaker 1:

I think it's probably most alternatives are more of a they have underperformed, especially the last two years, right, and when you've had private equity, that a lot of it has underperformed or it hasn't been able to, uh, go into the IPO market to realize that upward appreciation. Because it just hasn't happened. Now the great hope is next year. Right, because we've gone from. I think it was four years ago. We had about a thousand IPOs a year. In the last two years it's been about 104 IPOs a year on average. That's low and so you've got. Maybe it's a combination of not wanting to go through the regulation and the paperwork, and it also could be companies just don't want to be public because of what's required and also the sentiment when you you know if you underperform, you know you get your head handed to you and if you have a longer time horizon on how you're managing your firm, maybe. Maybe you don't want to go public, especially if you don't need to cash wise yeah for sure.

Speaker 2:

how much of um, how much alternatives are really sort of meant to be a play just against public equity volatility? Um, you know, when I think about, I'm thinking to myself less about return and more about smoothing, and smoothing only matters when equities get jagged. I think it's both.

Speaker 1:

I look at it that way. I look at it as a way of muting that downside for me and I know that I have over the eight years that I've had the nonprofit clients. I mean, I've got the numbers to prove it. Have I underperformed in the last year? Yeah, I have, but I'm fine with it because if you look at it over time, you do outperform your benchmark because you don't have that downside capture. If you went down less than 8% in 2022, that's not a bad thing. But again, clients retail clients typically, or individual clients forget that part Foundations less so and charities less so because the name of the game for them is a consistent return so that they can have consistent and hopefully growing distributions to their community, and that's the name of the game. I mean, we've basically gone from distributing a little under a million a year and this year it's going to be probably 2.3 to 2.5 that we're distributing and our profits have gone up exponentially this year as well, even though we have underperformed. But now we're starting to get some markups on those privates and I think that's going to continue to be the trend next year. So fingers crossed, I think.

Speaker 1:

For me it's the downside as well as I do like. Unfortunately it's probably for all of us. I'm a little bit addicted when you get that upside pop and you get the statement and you have the write-up like I did a few days ago for the options that I was talking about for tech employees that are basically put in the form of a VC product gone up probably I want to say, 25% in three months. That's nice, but that doesn't happen all the time. But if you can do that consistently and and you're going to add alpha too, as well as muting that downside- you started your own firm and every industry is saturated.

Speaker 2:

Every industry has a lot of competition. I've had a lot of experience with RIAs, I've been on the road, traveled, and it always struck me how little intellectual capital there is in our business, intellectual curiosity that most advisors, I find at least, are asset gatherers, not money managers. I'm curious, you know. I haven't been in the SMA world in some time, you know. But with the interactions you've had with others in the industry, do you get a sense that these fiduciaries are truly fiduciaries or are they just very good salespeople?

Speaker 1:

I guess I better get used to this, because the book that I've talked to you about that I'm working on, will cover this, I think for the majority. I have a chapter that's called the financial advisor the job title. That means little or nothing, because it's very easy to set yourself up as an advisor. The man that baked my wedding cake his bakery shut down and he became a financial advisor and he called me up asking for my assets. I've got quite a few stories like that. So usually the individuals in our business are very good at gathering assets.

Speaker 1:

I'm not. I'm good at being a portfolio manager. That's why I got into this business to be a portfolio manager and to make money. I'm good at being a portfolio manager. That's why I got into this business to be a portfolio manager and to make money. I'm not an asset gatherer.

Speaker 1:

That being said, when I have world where I was told we don't care what you read, michelle, on the weekends, we don't care what you think, we just went in every day seven o'clock, listened to the morning, call, went out and did whatever you were told in terms of I call it strawberry, chocolate, vanilla. You know you did your asset allocation If it was an account that was less than, sometimes less than 10 million. Now I think it's actually less than 25 million. I didn't really even have any control in terms of what I was allocating to. Somebody at a call center was doing it and I was just the face, even with an investment background. So it's a long winded way of saying yes, you're right. There's a big disparity against between financial advisors, and some of us are good at allocating and bringing in clients and some of us are being fiduciaries. That term, fiduciary, is banded about probably too easily with very, very little thought.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you had messaged me an example of the bad side of that disparity with a client that you're working on now. Talk through that a little bit.

Speaker 1:

I have a friend who's a financial journalist and his parents. His father was a doctor and he died about. The father died several years ago, I want to say almost 18, 20 years ago. The mother was a nurse. The parents of the doctor and the nurse were really good at educating their children. Their children all left their Midwestern home and went away and created their careers Some of them doctors, the journalists, as I mentioned, the lawyer but no one was watching what mom was doing.

Speaker 1:

And the husband, before he passed away, had made an introduction to an advisor before he passed away and made an introduction to an advisor, and that advisor took a hold of the nurse nurses slash widows funds and invested them about $4 million over a period of over that span of time about 20 years and no money. The woman died in the last few months. There's no money left, michael, at all. She died without any money. She died with advanced Alzheimer's and they didn't have enough money to put her in an Alzheimer's unit.

Speaker 1:

So I'm working on doing the forensics, trying to figure out what went wrong. Why does this person have nothing left and why also did the broker put a loan against? The majority of what he invested in were annuities, which that's another topic for another day, but I don't know if we're going to be able to get any of the money back. No-transcript. And now I'm not seeing everybody in the industries like that. We still have some really bad players. We read about them all the time, but I think a lot of us don't really ingest that and realize maybe we should look a little bit closer in terms of who we're putting in charge of not only our finances but possibly our parents' finances, because I find it interesting that that mother had all these kids and they just assumed that this guy who said I'm a fiduciary, your father gave me charge over this. These are all educated people and it's gone, but we read this stuff all the time, unfortunately, so you got to ask better questions.

Speaker 2:

The challenge here, of course, is that the end client doesn't know what they don't know Right, so they don't even know the right questions to ask, and it's hard to really even say, ok, well, you can, you can minimize that happening with just more regulation, which is typically sort of a response to that. Because, again, how many FAs are there, how many individuals? How many are competent, how many are not competent? How many have passed the CFA charter exams, gotten the charter, and are still incompetent, right? I mean, it's hard, I think, to sort of get to a higher standard.

Speaker 1:

Well, you can have the platinum standard, which is what you and I have, or we consider it to be the CFA, and a lot of people that have that still doesn't. That doesn't mean that they can manage a portfolio. That means they were very good at passing a series of tests. That being said, if you have a financial advisor that's passed the series six or seven, I think. Now when I took it, like several years back, it was six hours, now it's down to three. And keep in mind that you probably know this, michael, but the audience does it that test tells you what you can and cannot sell. It does not educate you on investments, and I used to always tell my students when I taught at University of Texas in Dallas that my finance students beginning year know more than a financial advisor.

Speaker 2:

That's actually an interesting direction to go, because there's more and more maybe skepticism is not quite the right word, but there's more and more skepticism around even needing a financial advisor or portfolio manager, because look at all these self-directed traders and how well they're doing in various investments. Has the role or the importance of a financial advisor changed for the worse, you think?

Speaker 1:

I think when you have markets like we're in now, it always is more difficult. I mean, I'll be honest, I've lost a couple of clients this year. Well, I really wanted Bitcoin and we need to own a lot of NVIDIA and, by the way, I do own NVIDIA and, as I said earlier, I was a semiconductor analyst, so we we have exposure to that. But everybody thinks they can do it themselves until they can't. And there are a lot of people that can put in the time and do their own research and find their own stocks, and that's great. But there are a lot of people that need direction stocks, and that's great. But there are a lot of people that need direction, and there's a high percentage of men, more than women, that have financial advisors, so I think they'd like to know what that person adds to their investments long term. Are they helping you reach your goal? Are they protecting you when everything goes to junk or to crap? In other words, because we do have down years, and especially if you've gotten to a point where you've built a significant amount of wealth, do you really want to just gamble with it and take a lot of chances with it? It's fine if you want to do that with a portion of your portfolio, but you want to do that with the majority of that.

Speaker 1:

I think Bloomberg had an article today that said I don't know what percentage of people or what number of people they talked to, but out of their survey of men and women, success is $5.3 million. Okay, okay, if we're going to get to 5.3 million dollars and we're the average working person who's educated, you better know what you're investing in and you better know what your upside is and your downside is. And that's one thing that I think that a lot of good advisors and people who have a portfolio management background they're going to evaluate it. I mean, that's kind of how, even how I, when I look at NVIDIA, yeah, it's got upside, but right now, how much could I potentially lose? How much is it lost over time? And if that client has built that amount of money, do I really really want to subject them to a large potential loss and do they have the time to gain it back?

Speaker 2:

You alluded to a book that you're working on. Let's talk about that, because it ain't easy writing a book.

Speaker 1:

No, it sucks. I hate it, it really does, but it's good discipline right.

Speaker 2:

So okay, so as I understand it, it's meant to be a little bit about your own experiences, obviously, and you've seen a lot of different things in your career. Talk about, sort of the first of all, the impetus for the book. Why did you decide to do that?

Speaker 1:

because, to your point, it's a lot of work, um, and you're busy enough as it is, so why you can go about the process um, up until about two years ago I, as I said uh before I taught at ut, uh finance as well as the cfa reviews, and uh also uh, my class upper class. We ran their mutual fund at UT and I would always tell stories because I was one of those professors that actually had real world experience. And I would tell them stories to keep their interest, because somebody is in school and you're competing as a professor against everything on their phone and on their computer. There's a lot of times you can tell people aren't listening to you during class. You've got to keep people's interest, and so I would do it with stories, usually very funny stories, and I had a lot of students say you know, professor, you should really write a book.

Speaker 1:

And so I got tired of telling the same stories over and over. And then I also am tired of seeing so many people not realizing who they're hiring as their advisor, and so I'm kind of meshing the two in terms of telling the stories, so that I can provide lessons in terms of what you should and shouldn't do as an investor, whether you're a hiring advisor, what you should look for or if you want to take more risks, you know, or if you're interested in alternative investments, because I talk about that as well, at the same time trying to be entertaining while you are learning those lessons, because most people fall asleep. You know, talking about risk or talking about you know, what should I look for in an advisor?

Speaker 2:

You know, eyes glaze over entertaining part is uh is missed by a lot of people. I, um, yeah, I have a good rapport with porter stansberry of stansberry research and he has a great quote. He says america will forgive you for being wrong, but won't forgive you for being boring. Uh, and you have to have that entertainment aspect, I think, in all content Lessons. Okay, so let's talk about some of the lessons in your career that you think are perhaps most important, that are covered in the book.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I'll start with a title and then I'll go down into the lesson. I'll do that quickly. So one chapter is called Buzz Lightyear, the Black Turtleneck and Dandruff. That was my meeting with Steve Jobs when he took Pixar public, and why it was interesting was that this is a period of time right before the first Toy Story came out, and he was actually doing his own investment banking presentations, because at the time he was persona non grata and everybody thought that Pixar wasn't that big of a deal. And so my story is how I prepared for that meeting, how I understood the model that he was putting together, how he was going to have enough leverage after Toy Story came out to renegotiate his contract with Disney, which he did.

Speaker 1:

And I participated in Pixar when it went public and put it in at that time my firm's micro-cap fund. But while I'm asking the questions at the table, a lot of the people that were there hadn't taken the time to look at the IPO offering or the red herring as it was known at the time and they weren't looking at the financial models. So they were just asking really stupid questions and not learning the story and the opportunity. So that's the point you know when, before you go in the room and start, or even pull the lever and start buying something that you don't understand, dig further. I think that's really, really important to do. So that's one of my stories.

Speaker 1:

And then I have another story that's called Barbies and Bulletproof Vests and that's the subtitle on that is the financial advisor, the job title.

Speaker 1:

That doesn't always mean a lot, and it's a story about how, when I worked for the Chicago firm, we did a lot of our sales through TD Ameritrade's brokerage firm and Schwab throughout the country and I was brought in to help close a sale as a portfolio manager with the broker for a very high-end client in Houston Texas high-end client in Houston Texas and as we're driving out to meet the client, the broker told me that he used to run money for gambling dens in Houston and he had been shot at several times and he had a family and he decided maybe this isn't such a good idea, maybe I should get a real job. So he decided that he had a neighbor that was in the financial field as an advisor for that firm and he went on and became a broker and, as far as the client knew, this guy is a great guy and he's working in a very prestigious firm and very beautiful office, but he knew nothing about investments. So those are some of the stories, michael.

Speaker 2:

Sounds like a horror book from that standpoint. No, no, there's a lot of fun stuff in there too. It doesn't surprise me, though, again just having interacted with so many different people with all kinds of interesting life experiences whatsoever. For those that are listening and watching this, Michelle, who are thinking about a financial advisor, make a pitch as far as why someone should choose somebody with your life experiences versus others, and how people engage with you.

Speaker 1:

I think if you're going to hire an advisor, they have to have a similar. They have to have a similar understanding to money that you do and even if you're at different points in your investment life cycle if you're a young investor or if you're, you know, in your last stages of acquiring your money make sure that that advisor understands what your goals are and make sure that you understand what is being used in your portfolio and why it's important and what kind of guardrails are in place. Or maybe you don't need guardrails, maybe you're in the accumulation stage and you want to take a lot of risk. Make sure that advisor is going to take a lot of risk Someone like me I'm going to. I wouldn't say it's conservative, but my focus again is on losing less so you make more, but adding some upside with the alternatives.

Speaker 1:

Find an advisor that looks at the investment world the same way you do. You don't have to look at politics the same way, but you have to look at money the same way and hopefully you're going to be on the same page. Not always, and if you're not, talk it through. But that person is supposed to be there to help you obtain your goals and they should have more knowledge than you. Otherwise, why are they there?

Speaker 2:

Michelle, for those who want to reach out to you or learn more about the firm, where would you point them to?

Speaker 1:

My website's being rebuilt. You or learn more about the firm. Where would you point them to? My website's being rebuilt so you can reach out to me on my email? Mconnell C-O-N-N-E-L-L. At Portia P-O-R-T-I-A. Hyphen capital dot com. The book's name is going to be the Wall Street Cowgirl.

Speaker 2:

And I will have you on when that is ready, ready to go.

Speaker 1:

I'm looking forward to that release you've you've gone through this path, michael. You know it's a longer process than you would like it to be everything always takes longer than people think.

Speaker 2:

The human mind is notoriously poor at cost estimation and time estimation, which is why I'm still kicking.

Speaker 1:

Uh, thank you, michelle, appreciate it thank you, michael, for having me, it was fun.

Speaker 2:

Cheers everybody.

Speaker 1:

Okay, bye.

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Michael A. Gayed, CFA

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