From NASA to Star Trek, Brad Barrie and David Johnson of @DynamicAlphaSol discuss how their shared interests inspired the development of their diversified mutual fund, which blends equity exposure with discretionary global macro allocations. They explain how this approach seeks to provide smoother returns through non-correlated exposures. Brad and David also delve into their backgrounds in aerospace, finance, and alternative investments. Tune in to learn how discretionary macro strategies can offer unique diversification benefits compared to systematic trend following. This episode discusses portfolio construction techniques including dynamic rebalancing models for mutual funds. Throughout, analogies from Star Trek, NASA, and other aeronautical aspects provide entertaining parallels for investment concepts, even attending and speaking at a Star Trek “con” (not in costume)to connect with individual investors! Jump on the starship enterprise with us, as we move from orbit to warp speed. Engage!
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From the episode:
Blog post – It may be a slow news day, but…
Blog post – The picture from space that shows why commodities are non-correlated to the stock market
Blog post – Set Phasers to ‘Systematic’
Dynamic Blog post: What Star Trek can teach you about investing & financial planning
Check out the complete Transcript from this week’s podcast below:
Set Phasers to Stocks+Discretionary Global Macro – with Dynamic Alpha
Jeff Malec 00:06
Welcome to the derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. Greetings humans. Yes, we’re bypassing the normal Star Wars Hello there because our guests today are Trekys and not just casual fans, they actually spoke on the similarities between sci fi and investing at a Star Trek convention ones. That’s a new one. It’s Brad Barrie and David Johnson of Dynamic Alpha Solutions, who run an outsourced CIO business and started a mutual fund that’s a bit of a twist on the latest trend of marrying traditional stock exposure with a non-correlated alternative investment. We’ve seen that done with long volatility we’ve seen it done with managed futures and trend following, but dynamic alpha is pairing discretionary global macro with their stock time. How does that work? Can it still provide the crisis period performance? What can discretionary managers do that systematic Can’t we dig into it all concluding with some of those Star Trek and investing corollaries such as when you should put shields up in your portfolio? Engage! This episode is brought to you by RCMs clearing and execution group which helps mutual funds like the one dynamic although runs efficiently access and trade exchange traded futures and derivatives market is our cmos.com to learn more, now, back to the show.
Jeff Malec 01:35
All right, everyone, we got Brad Barrie here and David Johnson. Brad, you got a lot of letters after your name there. What are all those letters for? Certified Financial Planner?
Brad Barrie 01:40
Yep, Certified Financial Planner, chartered financial consultant. I was a financial advisor for about 20 years, working with some wonderful people in the Chicagoland area. So
Jeff Malec 01:50
and then you left Chicago, right where you went to Vegas? Yep,
Brad Barrie 01:54
I left Chicago. I’m going to transition my practice to my partners, and I moved to Vegas for peace and tranquility. We’re just not we’re not normal people go for peace and tranquility. But where I met beautiful mountain views and sunset behind the mountains, and it’s better weather than Chicago. Most of the time. If
Jeff Malec 02:17
you’re living there, like draw parallels with Chicago for me. So you’re in like Evanston of Las Vegas, or what’s your Chicago equivalent?
Brad Barrie 02:26
Yeah, funny because I used to live in Evanston when I was in Chicago, and lived in a few other areas there. But yep, so I’m in Henderson, Nevada, which is just south of south of Las Vegas. It’s definitely considered a suburb. With again, wonderful people. It’s a wonderful place to live and on the phone,
Jeff Malec 02:46
are you like down on the strip, seeing a show or doing stuff like that? Not
Brad Barrie 02:50
very often. Oh, it’s which it’s funny as a as a money manager. You know, sometimes I’d have clients back in Chicago when I would visit Vegas and they’re like, Oh, you’re visiting Vegas? Hi, are you taking my money with you? Or you know, and it knows that know me know, I’m not a gambler. I don’t drink I don’t smoke. I’m kind of boring. But but it’s nice because it’s there when you want to get to it if you want to get to the with with ease.
Jeff Malec 03:21
I will put it in the show notes. But I wrote a blog post once Michael guys were I think his name. Anyway, this hedge fund manager guy he won like 240 grand playing blackjack during salt, I think and so someone got a hold of it and wrote this article of like, this guy’s risking all this money, blah, blah, blah. And I just the blog was did some quick math of like, he’s making call it 1% On 1.8 billion. And even if he gets X percent of that, like he was risking, even if he was risking $1,000 per bet it was basically like the rest was risking $5 A bit. So let the man have some fun. Absolutely. And David, where are you at?
David Johnson 04:02
I’m in Tampa Bay area.
Jeff Malec 04:04
All right, right across. Route 7050. It’s been too long. 70 What gets me over to Barrow sorry
David Johnson 04:11
to dry.
Jeff Malec 04:12
Yeah. That’s straight across the Clearwater.
David Johnson 04:15
Yeah, I four goes to Orlando. Yeah, I’m
Jeff Malec 04:20
saying I’m gonna go right from Tampa over to Vera. There’s like that little State Route 70 I think it is. Yeah. 60 Maybe? Yes.
David Johnson 04:29
It’s that’s how we 60 Yes, yes. All right, by a road you want to avoid at all cost?
Jeff Malec 04:34
Exactly. Let’s get into a little what you guys are doing, what the firm is doing. And then I want to get into some sci fi. So yeah, first tell us. Tell us about the firm. How you guys the background and how you found it. Yeah, so a little teaser of leaving A advisors base.
Brad Barrie 05:01
Yeah, so our firm is dynamic wealth group. We run two main businesses, we run dynamic Alpha solutions, which is outsourced Chief Investment Officer business where we support financial advisors helping them build truly diversified portfolios. And helping them provide solutions to their end client. And we also run dynamic Alpha funds, where we manage a mutual fund, the dynamic Alpha macro fund, ticker symbol is dynamics dy, and IX. It’s an interesting background on where we got to where we are. Being in Vegas, one of the nice things is I do go to a lot of conferences and conventions. So I’ll go to the strip, not to gamble, but to go to investment conferences. Again, I mentioned I’m kind of a boring person. But I’d rather go to investment conference then go to the casinos to gamble. And I met David at an AI conference about six years ago, the American Association of individual investors, and met David there and befriended them. And David was representing a number of alternative investments. And I invested with him befriended him. And, again, multiple dovetail into the science fiction conversation and a little bit, but we learned that we’re both avid dust Star Trek fans, and I’m kind of a through, you know, through the relationship developed. And at the time, I was consulting financial advisors, kind of as an OCIO, and an overall practice consultant. And I had invested in one of the hedge funds, David represented. And David kind of mentioned to me like, do you think you think other financial advisors would be interested in this strategy? And I’m like, I think so I was in that I was interested in it, I’ve invested in it. It’s unique, it’s differentiated. Let’s talk to some financial advisors. And we presented at some conferences, and got amazing feedback. financial advisors were like, We love this. We love this strategy. It’s non correlated, it performs extremely well. What’s the ticker? And and that was the issue because it was, you know, it was a private placement accredited status to In 20 fee structure, you know, the end and and financial advisors, like more turnkey, easy to implement solutions and products. So. So through connections and research, we, we worked on launching a mutual fund. And it’s, uh, you know, we’ll dive into the mutual fund as the conversation goes, but it’s an innovative solution that combines global macro fundamental approach with with equities, so. Yeah, and I think as the conversation goes, we’ll dive a little bit deeper into that, and how and why we did it, you know, did it and it’s managed, but yeah, it’s kind of a
Jeff Malec 08:06
well, now fact check you have with David’s recollection of the events. Is that how it went down, David? Absolutely. And what were you doing at the? Ay ay ay ay ay. What is it? Ah, yeah. Yeah.
David Johnson 08:20
Yeah, I, you know, I spoke there. And this was back in like, 2018 this before? COVID. Yeah. And some of those
Jeff Malec 08:28
give me like, the lot, a lot of tire kickers. Right. Do you feel that or you felt was worthwhile for, like, money manager? And it was
David Johnson 08:39
for me, because at that time, you know, my main business was, I was actually an ID. Yeah. And so I represented a lot of CPAs. And I basically went there to educate people on, you know, how managed futures works, how it can differentiate your portfolio, because it’s uncorrelated with the stock market, all this stuff. And they weren’t getting any of that. They were just getting the stock guy. That’s that guy, the stock guy. Yeah. You know. And so, you know, I had passed, I saw, you know, I did that for probably, you know, seven or eight years, at least, you know, in the main state, met a lot of people and educated a lot of people. So it was it was fun. I got to know a lot of CTAs got to know how they did what they did. I used to design trading systems back years ago when I was working in FX after I left aerospace. But this was a little different. And give
Jeff Malec 09:44
us that little left aerospace were we doing in aerospace? Well,
David Johnson 09:50
my first career was at NASA. And I was there for a short time. The NASA NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and how Still Alabama. Yep. It’s really built the Apollo rocket.
Jeff Malec 10:03
Right? Is that where they send the kids now to space camp and on it? Yeah,
David Johnson 10:07
he’s awesome. It’s really nice. It’s a space camp.
Jeff Malec 10:12
And what was your you designing rockets designing flight plans? What were you doing?
David Johnson 10:17
I was, I was in a special engineer, I was working on the shuttle on some subsystems in the Shuttle. And that was, you know, I was a junior engineer. And I was, you know, very green. But I figured out very, very quickly that NASA didn’t really design things anymore. Like after Apollo. It’s also it’s our contractors. Yeah. You know, space and defense contractors, the Lockheed, the northern Brahmins, you know, they they do they do all fun work. Yeah,
Jeff Malec 10:44
that scare you a little bit. Like if there’s right, how many subcontractors are putting all their stuff into this one? Hundreds 1000s. Right. That scares me of like, how do they all know those systems are gonna work together? Yes.
David Johnson 10:56
Single Point failures. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite subjects. I was actually. So I became a systems engineer, I went to work for Honeywell space systems here in Clearwater. And I worked there for about 22 years, and had a wonderful career there. It was a lot of fun. I worked at the Justice Space Center for five years, and on space station program to talk about complicated project, the most complicated thing ever put in space.
Jeff Malec 11:26
And now they’re talking about they might scrap it, right. I
David Johnson 11:30
know. They don’t have anything to take his place. Like the show late scrapped. The show didn’t have anything takes place. This is our government at work.
Jeff Malec 11:38
Yeah, that’s, that’s a separate podcast. Yeah. So the shows, and said,
David Johnson 11:45
So I basically left that. And I got into, you know, just basically took early retirement, you know, want to do something different. And got into, you know, got into, basically
Jeff Malec 11:56
something crazier in space futures. Yeah, exactly. And then it was maybe maybe
David Johnson 12:03
options here.
Jeff Malec 12:06
So Brad years, and hey, I know this stock said this. And David, I know this alternative said, Let’s marry him together. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Barrie 12:14
And there’s definitely the linkage. One of the things that David said that that resonates with me is the education component. David loved educating folks on the alternatives and what they are and how they used and as a financial advisor, I always viewed part of my role is to help educate investors and my clients on different financial planning aspects. So, you know, there’s there’s definitely a lot of the similar thinking David actually tells a story about when he was at NASA. I love this story, because it talks about defining the right problem. And, David, I’ll paraphrase it, but but but feel free to jump in. But when you think back to was it was it the Apollo program when they were originally trying to send astronauts up to space? Yeah, yeah.
David Johnson 12:56
So yeah, so so so basically, one of the lessons I learned from my emeritus engineer, who was mentoring me, I first got there was the whole idea is that, you know, the first 50%, of solving a problem is properly defining the problem upfront. Yeah. And most people skip that part. So they wind up with a solution to some problem, just not the one they’re trying to solve. And that’s basically what happened. The reason he told me that story is, that’s what happened with the space program early on, they tried to figure out a way to get this capsule and the person and the capsule back down to earth without burning the capsule. So they’ve tried to create an indestructible material. There isn’t an indestructible
Jeff Malec 13:42
material, right? So let’s, let’s figure it the other way, is that I think Einstein has a few give me an hour to figure out a problem I’ll spend. If you give me an hour for a problem of 55 minutes, figuring out the problem and five minutes on the solution.
David Johnson 13:56
Exactly. So finally, an engineer one day said, hey, guess what, we’re solving the wrong problem. The problem is to get the astronaut back alive. Yeah, not to create an indestructible capsule. And so they came up with the ablative heat shield.
Jeff Malec 14:12
So you know, you’re gonna get uncomfortable in there. But
David Johnson 14:16
yeah, it’s gonna get uncomfortable, but it’s gonna get you down, you know, it’s gonna last just long enough. I love it. That’s a great example.
Jeff Malec 14:26
And taking a step back, Brad, on the OCIO side, do you see that as our more RAS shifting to that or more RAS separating? Like, hey, I’m your golf buddy. I’ll take you out to golf. I know how to get relationships. And then it seems so old fashioned that we thought that the same person could be the person head down solving complex financial metrics and figuring out the right portfolio. It’s the same guy who wants to go have beers and golf and do all this and I’m sure they’re out there, right? They exist, but it seems like We’re moving towards a point in the adviser industry where those two are become decidedly separate.
Brad Barrie 15:04
Yeah, I mean, again, having been an advisor myself for 20 years, advisors are pulled in many, many different directions. And you know, whether it’s understanding whether a client should do a Roth IRA conversion or not, or should they retire at 65? Or 67? What about Medicare? What about estate planning? What about their insurance needs? What about cash flow management, debt management generational, I mean, there’s so much that a really good financial adviser should be doing and is doing that they don’t have the time to do what we do have of I like to say we continuously scour the investment universe, looking for new and better investment ideas. And that’s how I found David going to a conference and uncovering new investment ideas, we still do that to this day. So financial advisors that really want to build differentiated portfolios. Because look, if you’re just going to do a standard 6040 stock bond portfolio, you know, you don’t need an OCIO you don’t need, you know, I dare say even a money manager, you know, you buy two or three ETFs, or index funds, and you call it a day. But if you do that you’re not diversified. And, and you’re going to take more risk than you think you are, and you’ll have a bumpier ride than then you should. And at the end of the day, that’s, that’s the problem. Again, talking about defining the problem. That’s the problem. We think advisors should be solving for their clients on an investment standpoint, how do you build a smoother investment experience. And that’s what we specialize in is building a smoother investment experience, through model portfolios that allow the advisor to grow to scale, that allows the advisor to spend more time with their clients, be it in marketing, be it in research, being in planning, knowing their clients, what whatever. We, we help the advisor, do an even better job and be kind of that. That financial planning hero for their clients.
Jeff Malec 17:10
And what what do you mean by smoother? I think I know what you mean, but define what you mean by smoother.
Brad Barrie 17:16
Yeah, so smoother to us is is, you know, less downside volatility. Right. And that’s one of our mantras too is is I mean, been in this industry. As long as I have, you know, it’s always presented to me that standard deviation is risk. And standard deviation is not risk. My degree is in mathematics and economics. And if you look at what standard deviation is, it’s the deviation on the up and on the down, right. And in 20 years of sitting across the table from individual clients. I never once met a client that didn’t want deviation on the upside, right? People want deviation on the upside. They just don’t want it on the downside. So we try to build portfolios, that, that minimize that downside experience, right, while still having the necessary returns, investors need to meet their goals.
Jeff Malec 18:10
It’s 100% on your side, but I’d argue briefly on the other side, it’s an easy way to say hey, what tends to have the most downside deviation, stuff with a lot of upside deviation? Right? So it’s kind of a lazy way to get there. But that’s, that’s the support of standard deviation as the metric for times sometimes, but excluding managed futures, right, which is, which lunch be?
Brad Barrie 18:33
Yeah, and in looking at in a perfect theoretical world, it is a bell shaped curve, right? You think a perfect bell shaped curve, that, you know, it’s 5050 on both bell shaped curves, but we don’t live in a perfect world last time I checked. So there is skewness to a bell shaped curve, and you can have greater gain deviation and lower loss deviation with different asset classes and different strategies. And that’s one of the ways that we do it. Is it as simple as it sounds? we diversify. But when we diversify, we’re not just diversifying with with asset classes, right? That’s the way it’s always been done. You have your stocks, you have your bonds, you have your alternatives. We diversify with different asset classes, but also with different approaches, and with different strategies, right. So, you know, sometimes we’re asked what’s better quant or fundamental or technical analysis? You know, should you buy and hold? Should you be tactical? Our answer is yes. All of the above. Yeah, that’s because that is diversification, right? We diversify by having tactical managers that maybe use technical analysis and having managers that use fundamentals or quant or algo. Right, and the diversification is we actually call our portfolios in our OCIO model, multi dimensional portfolios, which again, is maybe a A testament to the science fiction that we’ll talk about. But we believe in multi dimensional diversification. It’s funny, we had this conversation with an advisor, just this last week about non correlation is not just binary, it’s not just the correlation to stocks that should be measured is the correlation to everything in the portfolio. So it’s not, oh, I have an alternative I use, then it’s non correlated to stocks. And that’s good. But what about another alternative, you can have multiple alternatives, investments, and they can be non correlated to stocks, but also non correlated to each other. Right. So it’s that multi faceted multi dimensional, you know, portfolios that we build in the OCIO that truly help an advisor differentiate their practice as well. So that they can help to get new clients, and most importantly, helping meet their goals.
Jeff Malec 21:01
And just, as you mentioned, the 6040 and bonds in a portfolio, what are your thoughts of right? We had this unbelievable 30 year run rates from whatever eight to zero or 19 to zero, whatever you want to quote. Surely, who knows? But surely, that’s not going to look the same? Over the next 30 years? Right. So does that break? 6040? Does that just make it the path look different? What are your thoughts there?
Brad Barrie 21:27
Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question. And and, you know, we’ve written about 6040 or 6040. Dead, is it? Is it not dead? Look, in our model portfolios are OCIO portfolios, we have a sleeve that is in essence 6040. Right, that is an essence maybe it’s at 20 2080? That is beta weighted stocks, beta weighted bonds. But that’s just a sleeve of the portfolio. Right? It’s certainly not not everything, our bond is going to look the way they did over the last 30 years. Absolutely not. I mean, you You stated the reason yourself. But we’re also believers in not trying to predict the future. Look, the market is predicting what six or seven rate cuts this year? I don’t think the Fed is predicting that. Right. And the feds are the one that are going to do it. So and I think the bond market may have priced a lot of that in already. You know, if you look at bonds last year, last year, somebody would look at the full year of bond performance and said, Oh, last year was a good year for bonds. I would look at last year’s return experience. And last year was not a good return experience for bonds. So you look at it month to month, day to day bonds volatility, I think I forget what the metric is for bond volatility index, the move index very high. And I have a chart that looks at what bonds did month to month it went up 4% Down 4% Up three, it’s not the return experience bond investors want. If it wasn’t for the last two months of the year, bonds went up 12% In the last two months of last year, if that hadn’t happened, bonds would have had their third year in a row of negative returns. And, you know, I asked folks, why did bonds go up? 12% in two months? Did I miss the big Fed rate cut from Jerome Powell? Yeah, no, he didn’t. But the market is forward looking. The market expects all these rate cuts. Well guess what happens to bonds? If we don’t get those rate cuts? Right back then yeah, it’s going to be problematic. So we we implement, again, a lot of alternatives, a lot of bond alternatives into the models that we use, as well as equity like alternatives, futures, you name it.
Jeff Malec 23:42
David, maybe for you are also like, so all those alternatives which may be uncorrelated with each other uncorrelated with stock bonds, you found yourselves moving towards managed futures and global macro, like, do you find those have the most unique return profile out of all the quote unquote, alternatives,
David Johnson 24:02
especially when you get to ones that are more fundamentally managed, as opposed to you know, trend following following a system? Not that they’re all the same, but they’re all following a formula. And, you know, most of the time, when there’s a fundamental aspect to it, it’s more, it’s more waiting to see dislocations and things that are going to create opportunities down the road and knowing how to look for the size of those things to come about. Go. And sample. Well, you I think you should do the CoCo example. Brad my
Brad Barrie 24:42
favorite. Yeah, it’s my favorite. Yeah, so So last year, there was a trade by by our futures trading advisor in his program, where he went long cocoa, and he went long cocoa because of a bad weather pattern here. In towards the Ivory Coast, bad fertilizer utilization by the local farmers, and the crop was already having issues. So those are easily understood, especially by investors, reasons that could drive the price of cocoa higher. And those reasons have nothing to do with, with Tesla’s deliveries this quarter with the new Apple goggles that are coming out with Jerome Powell, what he’s talking about this month, right? It’s totally non correlated with causation. Right? That’s one of the key things that that we look for in any investment is is there a cause for the non correlation? Otherwise, you just have happenstance, right. And if we can identify that there’s a reason for the non correlation, it’s more likely that it will continue to be non correlated, versus the happenstance. But the mispricing in the cocoa is an is a great example. And it turned out to be a profitable, profitable trade. And those types of kind of demand supply imbalances are are what, what we look for.
Jeff Malec 26:19
I’m gonna pitch the blogging and there’s another post from way back when in my blog days of the picture from space that proves commodities aren’t correlated. And it was a freak snowstorm in Montana in like June or July, maybe June in the No, it was later in the year, maybe August. But the cows hadn’t grown their winter coats yet. So it killed off like 60% of the cattle and right and and live cattle went limit up for like four or five days in a row. And reading that has nothing like you’re saying nothing to do with how many cars Tesla produced nothing to do with the fed with GDP, anything there was a storm. In a limited commodity supply that competition.
Brad Barrie 27:01
Only way to gain exposure, the only way to gain exposure is through the direct commodity. Because sometimes we’ll have somebody in our audience say, with our cocoa example. Or you could use the cow example the beef. Well, I’ll just buy Hershey’s. If the prices are going up. I’ll just buy Hershey’s. And we would say well,
Jeff Malec 27:20
think of actually you have to buy that. Yeah, Hershey’s
Brad Barrie 27:23
has to buy the cocoa from the farmers. I’m sure they’re buying it through a few intermediaries first, but but they’re the ones that have to buy it from the farmers and you know, the cocoa prices going up actually hurts her she’s in Nestle’s earnings not not not help. But same thing with with beef, you wouldn’t want to buy, I don’t know, Purdue or whatever the large beef, you know, seller is but you need the direct. And that’s the beauty of futures is giving you that direct exposure that most investors do not have most advisors do not. Do not have that with their with their investors. And
Jeff Malec 28:05
how do you solve the trick? Is there isn’t this beef example in this Coco example every month like clockwork? And those are relatively smaller markets. So how do you solve that problem of cool if this is uber successful, and we have $6 trillion, trying to get access to these kinds of things? What do we
David Johnson 28:24
do? Well,
Jeff Malec 28:27
6 trillion might be able to go
David Johnson 28:29
6 trillion is a little much, okay, let’s go with 600 It is opportunistic by nature, okay? Because I mean, there are always going to be trends happening, but there aren’t super big trends all the time, you know, and those winds up being super big trades, you know, do great. So if you’re approaching it from the fundamental side, a lot of times it gets into, you know, we’ll just call it, you know, strong conviction ideas, and concentrating positions. I mean, you still have to do risk management. But there’s a difference between having a strategy where you cut off the fat tail, you know, the right tail, and because you want to just normalize your returns, you know, but you your overall return suffers typically when you do that, because you’re cutting off that profit, and, and having the conviction to build the position. Because you think you have fundamental reasons to think it’s, it’s not done yet. We’ll watch it, but it’s not done yet. That’s gonna
Jeff Malec 29:34
be the second part, right? So a trend follower has those positions probably made money, but they’re risking so little of the portfolio on just that market, or just that sector that it doesn’t really move the needle all that much.
David Johnson 29:47
It’s kind of like going back to I mean, I heard this years and years ago when I first started studying investing, like Warren Buffett, right? And they were saying, like, you know, how should you diversify your portfolio and he was Like, well, you have more than 20 stocks. I mean, that’s probably too many. Because that’s the way he thinks, you know, like you concentrate on ideas, I served him pretty well. And that’s in the stock world, which is, you know, to some degree more difficult because there’s so much noise.
Jeff Malec 30:18
And so the idea is you’re finding sourcing these discretionary, I call them economy fundamental, somewhat similar. And now there’s kind of a new thing. We’ve had a few guys on the podcast quantum mental, right, they’re kind of systematizing, those fundamental views, so they can run through a bunch of them more quickly. So finding a bunch of those and pairing them with traditional stuff, as well as trend following in some cases. Or would you call in Are you calling those discretionary? Guys, your global macro, so to speak?
David Johnson 30:52
Yes. The, the discretionary. The fundamental side is discretionary. The future side is discretionary. Yeah. And it’s, and it’s, there’s still all the risk management and everything in there. But the reason that I think that it’s, it’s so additive to what we’re doing is because it’s, it’s different than what a lot of people do, because the process to get the ideas is different, because it’s all coming from up here. It’s not an algorithm. You know, it’s everybody’s unique. I mean, there’s, there’s 100 trillion connections up here. Nobody’s the same?
Jeff Malec 31:33
And is this a lot of discretionary traders? Like, why doesn’t Citadel or Millennium or whatever, just right, they could analyze the same stuff come to the same conclusions? Right? Why? Why don’t they do what some of these discretionary guys are doing in OGs? Or cocoa or grain markets?
David Johnson 31:51
Well, who’s to say they’re not doing that some of the time? You know, but, yeah, I mean, you don’t really know what they’re doing. You know, but they’re, they have so much money, they’re doing everything that you could possibly do they have to spread money around because they’ll affect the markets.
Jeff Malec 32:07
Right? Or that’s, I think the correct answer is it’s not worth their time. Or if it’s a $300 million opportunity, like whatever we need, we have better uses for that in bond world, or currencies or whatever.
David Johnson 32:20
Yeah, it’s different by market to I mean, you know, the, I mean, the metals markets, not that big agricultural markets, not that big, you know, the financial markets are the indices, they’re a little bigger, the bond market, you know, the FX market. They’re a little bigger, but
Brad Barrie 32:39
I think you touched on something important, Jeff, with the and this is one of the reasons we chose to launch a mutual fund, right? It’s, it’s, I had a successful career as a financial advisor. I didn’t wake up one day, I’m like, you know, let’s do it. Let’s launch a mutual fund, right? It’s, you know, in creating portfolios,
Jeff Malec 32:56
do the same as saying let’s step stab a shark stick. And, yeah,
Brad Barrie 33:01
but when we look at the marketplace for what’s available in you know, call it liquid alternatives, or mutual funds, or ETFs. There are some amazing products out there in the Managed futures world, right. And we’ve we’ve used some of them in our OCIO solutions for advisors. And we still do, because it pairs extremely well with with our own mutual fund. But there wasn’t a single mutual fund that we identified or ETF, that was what we call fundamental, or you can call discretionary, based on the future side. The majority of them were trend following algorithmic, and again, they’re great funds, and they provide non correlation diversification. But again, we like building things with a causation for the diversification and given that, that our strategy implements a fundamental program, where it’s discretionary, it that the correlation between our strategy and others is near zero, even though it’s futures based, you know, in managed futures is many times synonymous with trend following. And that’s not what, what our program does at all. And it helps to give that diversification
Jeff Malec 34:18
is the trade off there that you may not be there in like a classic Oh, wait, sell off for a crisis period?
David Johnson 34:26
Oh, well, I think if you have a, you know, something that’s happening, that’s obvious, you know, you’re going to kind of be in it. But if you start having a pullback, you might not get out. You might just, you know, especially if you’re playing with profits, you just, you know, because you’re, you know, it’s got further to go because you’ve done the research and supply and demand, haven’t even dealt yet. Right.
Jeff Malec 34:50
So it’s like health considers like alpha based diversification instead of structurally beta based, right. The trend followers are kind of saying hey, We’re not doing anything special here, we’re capturing every breakout. One out of 10 of them is going to be the breakout where it’s an oh eight, sell off, and we’re going to be there because we were in, we were wrong the nine times before. Sounds like you’re saying more like, Hey, we’re going for, we might be wrong one out of the 10 times, but we’re gonna have high conviction on the other night, six out of 10, probably not nine out of 10. But something along those lines, right of like, kind of flip that logic of, we’re looking for greater chance of success and greater conviction on those trades.
David Johnson 35:35
Yeah, more concentrated positions, because the research has been done. Even if it doesn’t pan out right away, as long as you hadn’t hit your risk limits, you just wait it out. I mean, you know, if, if an idea doesn’t, doesn’t look like it’s quite ready, and it hits the risk limit, we might get stopped out and you know, you know, two or three weeks, it starts happening, like it added to it could go months, could be in the position for months, it could get rolled several times. Yeah. So it really is global macro.
Jeff Malec 36:11
When I hear global macro, I think back to Tim broke the Bank of England, what’s his name George Soros, right of like, okay, I’m taking this big, massive bet on this currency. And most other historical, global macro guys have been kind of global GDP bets are like, country currency bets, country rate bets?
David Johnson 36:31
Not necessarily, but I see what you’re saying. Yeah. So
Jeff Malec 36:34
but then that was kind of more discretionary, global macro. And now, systematic global macro has kind of morphed into more trend following. So just you’re saying this is almost another piece over here of like, discretionary more commodity focus global market
David Johnson 36:49
when you actually use that example, before the GA, okay. Yeah. The, you know, the Soros example, because it was just so he saw all the pieces coming together. So he made the bet. And it worked out. Its historical, because it all happened, like, one time. Yeah.
Jeff Malec 37:07
It was, like a cascade. It was, yes. When it happens and hit a
David Johnson 37:12
billion dollars in a day or something, you know, but,
Jeff Malec 37:16
but are you saying, Are they more commodity focus, or no, so, so some of those. Okay,
David Johnson 37:21
yeah, it’s, it’s across the spectrum. We trade 45 different markets. So there’ll
Jeff Malec 37:26
be in rates, they’ll be in stock indices? Got? Yes.
David Johnson 37:29
Yes. And, as matter of fact, in in 2020. We were we were short palladium, of all things. Yeah. And, and really had had to do with, it didn’t have to do with COVID, which was kind of strange. But it had to do with they were pulling palladium out of catalytic converters. And so it was gonna be an oversupply. And you know, and the prices that the manager saw that saw it was going to happen in a shorter palladium. That was, that was a very good trade.
Brad Barrie 38:12
That goes into one of the issues I mentioned before about preparing versus predicting, right? It’s like, the manager didn’t predict that there was going to be a global pandemic, right. You know, he wasn’t having lunch with Fauci one day, and all of a sudden, you know, it’s like, oh, this is gonna happen, you know, there was no insight insight there. It was, he was diversified beyond just stocks and bonds into palladium, for reasons that were not related to global economic growth of equities or corporations. And he was just positioned a certain way in an asset class that moved in the right direction, you know, regardless of what was going on with, with global pandemic issues, right. So it’s, it’s the, you know, there’s a saying I like to use it says, it’s the bus that you don’t see that hits you. Right, so everybody’s talking about the bus. And if everybody’s talking about this, this is going to happen, this is going to happen. Seldom is that the bus that hits you, it’s the bus that’s around the corner that you don’t see, right, it’s nobody saw global pandemic, nobody saw bad things that happened and sometimes it’s a good bus that comes in picks you up, right and maybe it’s the you know, the iPhone, nobody saw the iPhone coming until it launched. Right and that was a huge bus that carried a lot of people you know, or the Tesla electric vehicle or whatever, right. So it’s been prepared and truly diversified regardless of what happens is, you know, our mantra the
Jeff Malec 39:42
sorry real quick the add on to that would be the bus that you don’t see and the most people are unlikely to see is the one that hits hits all yeah, sorry, Dave, Oregon say?
David Johnson 39:56
I don’t know. I think I killed it. Sorry. Yeah. All right. Um, so yeah, so So I think the other thing that’s important is the, the idea that the process of coming up with the ideas, you know, there’s a process, but after that it’s it’s pretty systematic in terms of position sizing and risk limits. And, you know, all those kind of things have to be done like everybody else has to do. It’s where the ideas are being generated. But because that element is there, I think that if, if unpredicted things come into the process, the manager has the ability to override the system, so to speak, because this system, okay, where that really doesn’t exist, and like system trading, like there was an example, when I was first starting to work with him. And I was, you know, going through trades, and I looked at a trade, and I’m like, it’s interesting. He’s like, short, and like, like, an offset nice, reverse knees long. And then it’s this huge trade. And so I asked you about it. And I said, what happened here? He said, Well, we had this strong conviction on this, but there was a piece of information we didn’t have. And when this piece of information came out, it literally flipped the narrative. And the whole thing changed. And we just reversed our position. And did that the flexibility to do that and conviction, based on, you know, based
Jeff Malec 41:26
on new information, and then Brad talk, talk for a minute about the kind of traditional side of the mutual fund, right, so you’re pairing? Right what my friends at mutiny fund would call the offense side with this defense side that’s not correlated. So talk to us a little about the offense.
Brad Barrie 41:43
Yeah, so um, so so we invest the equities, primarily in US equities, all US equities, for the most part, a large company, we balance it between growth. So we put about 50% of the mutual fund in equities. But 20% is in growth oriented stocks about 10% is in what you’d call or kind of s&p 500 likes stocks. And then another 20% is in more dividend focused stocks. Call it value, but but we prefer more dividend focused than just pure value per se. Just as a way of making sure we’re not buying cheap stocks that are cheap for a reason, they have strong strong dividends. We use ETFs, currently as kind of the primary vehicle to get exposure to the equities. And we’re active on on the ETFs that we pick and rebalancing them and cognizant on, on any tax loss harvesting that might be necessary. But it’s really designed to get, you know, market weighted equity exposure. And because it’s non correlated with the global macro side, it really helps to, to balance the two together, right? And sometimes we’ve been asked like, well, what’s the secret sauce of the mutual fund? Is it the global macro manager? Or is it what is it and it’s really defined in the name of the fund, the fund is called the dynamic Alpha macro fund. And we view dynamic alpha is that rebalancing alpha, right, we’re able to rebalance between the two sides, dynamically at the right time when one gets out of whack versus another, which then in essence, allows us that ability to, you know, sell high and buy low. And then things revert, you know, because of the non correlation that helps to, you know, all our our our analysis has shown that helps to keep return stronger with minimizing the downside risk. So
Jeff Malec 43:42
and that that’s a model, you came up with the dynamic rebalancing, or is it done monthly, quarterly, sit on a time schedule or a, we have
Brad Barrie 43:50
thresholds, three thresholds along with kind of some timeframes of quarterly
Jeff Malec 43:56
bands if it gets outside of a band reset? Correct. Correct. How do you feel have you done research on bands versus time base?
Brad Barrie 44:05
We have Yeah, we’ve we’ve done a lot of that analysis. And, you know, we wrote We also try to be cognizant of the tax ramifications of over rebalancing can cost more can generate more taxes, just investors invest in IRAs, but certainly not everybody does. So so we’re trying to be cognizant of balancing all those other costs along with performance. And that’s why we kind of settled on threshold based bands along with kind of a quarterly timeframe as well. And we’ve we’ve been blessed with positive flows into the mutual fund. And that that allows us to kind of rebalance as flows are coming in as well. So we’ve been able to not have to generate any tax gains on the equity side by rebalancing just from the positive flows that are that are coming into the mutual fund.
Jeff Malec 44:59
And what Real quick, then we’re gonna get into sci fi. What’s the limit? In your opinion of diversification, right? If you’re adding like, would you go so far? Like we’re having life settlements, and we’re doing cat bonds? And we’re doing right, like, what’s the practical limit of what you would consider enough diversification and stuffing things in there in
Brad Barrie 45:20
that fund? Or?
Jeff Malec 45:22
Well, yeah, I mean, I know there’s regulatory constraints on that. So just pretend you have a vehicle that could do anything. Yeah, I mean, that’ll be our entree into sci fi this year sci fi world where any investment can be made in any investment vehicle.
Brad Barrie 45:37
Yeah, I mean, because that’s the thing is sometimes I like to return refer to alternatives as the alternative to alternatives. Because to a lot of investors or advisors, alternatives are real estate or gold or silver. And to us alternatives means a lot, lot more it means merger arbitrage, dividend capture, managed futures, global, macro, buffered, you know, structured notes, you know, you name it, right. Yeah, life settlement. And some of those other things very esoteric out there. Yeah, it’s a matter of getting the right vehicle. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s a ton of those alternatives, litigation financing, and, you know, things like that can really stretch the envelope of, of what’s out there. And we love exploring it, you know, we have a long watch list of things that we’re always tracking. And, you know, it’s, you know, it’s tough to fit things in a simplified portfolio, which is also one of our objectives. It’s one of our taglines of simplifying complexity. That doesn’t
Jeff Malec 46:44
matter if you have the best space shuttle to borrow from earlier in the conversation if you can’t get any people in it if you can’t flat. Correct, right. Correct. But and you probably agree with me here, the deeper I go down into those quote unquote, alternatives. There are more alternative strategies of right of they’re just different flavors of stocks, bonds, credit, and they’re mostly all they need GDP growth and great economy. They’re cool. Yeah. And they do a lot of cool things. And they’re non correlated most of the time. I think the problem is back to that concept of fundamental non correlation, like, they don’t necessarily have that. If things break credit dries up all this stuff, they’re likely going to break as well. We’d like
Brad Barrie 47:28
to ask that we’d like to ask the question, what’s going to drive the return? Right? What’s the return driver? Right? So like, with our cocoa example, there’s three identifiable things are going to drive that return. Right. And it’s the key part is what is going to drive the return because one of the one of the very popular alternative investments these days is private equity. Yeah. And there’s an understatement. But yeah, yeah. And it’s funny, because when I talk to folks or meet folks about, you know, they talk about I’m in private equity. I’m like, Oh, you’re an equity. And at the end of the day, private equity
Jeff Malec 48:00
is equity. It it’s right there in the name, folks.
Brad Barrie 48:04
It’s right there in the name. And I think it’s it’s a Cliff Asness, right from AQR, he uses the term volatility laundering. Yep. And, you know, look, we think anything can can work and private equity can have its role, but you just don’t want to fool yourself to thinking that it’s going to be non correlated. If it’s going to be driven by, you know, economic growth. It’s like an equity, because it is
David Johnson 48:29
just, you just can’t redeem this quickly. Right?
Jeff Malec 48:33
It used to trade at a discount because of the liquidity and now it trades at a premium because of the right oh, I don’t have to see the real returns on a daily monthly basis. I’ll pay you extra for this. Yeah,
Brad Barrie 48:45
you can get that with regular equities to you just don’t open your statements or log on to your investment account for three months.
Jeff Malec 48:54
The old Rip Van Winkle approach All right, let’s get into a little sci fi so you guys bonded way back when in the first conversation. You’re like NASA. I don’t remember when.
Brad Barrie 49:10
Yeah, when it came up, I think would just befriended each other. And I mentioned to David that I’m gonna go to the Star Trek convention this weekend because the largest one is in Vegas every year.
Jeff Malec 49:21
To help them used to be right it used to be at the
Brad Barrie 49:23
Hilton it’s at the Rio now. It’s run by creation entertainment. I don’t think it’s actually called the Star Trek convention anymore. They had some trademark issues. So I think it’s something called something else. But in essence, it’s a convention for the Star Trek fans and all the actors come to it and creation entertainment does an amazing job putting the conference on and I mentioned to David I was going like on David’s I’m Star Trek Star Trek fan and and then it’s a little tricky. We can say yeah, and then I said well, why don’t you come and I had a spare ticket and and David came and you might be looking for if he
Jeff Malec 50:01
puts on like a clean on forehead. I’m
Brad Barrie 50:03
not quite. Oh, yeah.
Jeff Malec 50:07
Oh, nice.
Brad Barrie 50:09
Yeah, totally. It’s right. Yeah. Captain Kirk Shatner
Jeff Malec 50:14
should be worth 7 billion or so when he had all that expedient stuff stock, but he puked out of it in like, oh nine. I think he sold it all at $1.
Brad Barrie 50:26
Yeah. David, tell him your story about about kind of William Shatner. And
David Johnson 50:30
yeah, so I kind of always wanted to meet him, but it just, you know, didn’t have the opportunity, obviously, but he was my inspiration for getting into the space program. So when I was 10 years old, I turned the TV on. And it was the just happened to be, you know, they didn’t have reruns back then, for the most part. It happened to be the first episode of Star Trek. Was it the first one with the salt monster? You know, the whole nine yards? Yeah, that was enthralls you 10 years old, like what is this? So I was hooked. And right, then I decided I’m going to be an astronaut, astronaut. So after I got older, I realized, you know, the math says I got about a point oh, 2% chance of getting to be an astronaut. So I’m just gonna work in the space program. To be an engineer and work on spacecraft meet astronauts and I actually did wind up going to Johnson. I was there for five years and worked with astronauts designing the space station. I was in meetings with them all the time, and just had a great time. But I always wanted to thank Shatner, because he’s the guy that sent me on that path. Or it never would have happened. You know, just happenstance. So I actually got to meet him and tell him this story. You got a photo up with him? And of course all that’s great. I’m so happy for you. I’m like you probably did it 10,000 times a day. Yeah. And
Jeff Malec 52:00
then you’ve got a little like my poster behind me of sci fi not just Star Trek but sci fi into investing what’s what’s your take that yeah,
Brad Barrie 52:10
so so we have a blog on our website too. There’s there’s a few blogs and there’s a blog we have on what Star Trek can teach you about investing. And I love your infographic as well on on the Star Wars. I’ve sent that to a few folks in I think it was a few years ago was last year earlier last year the the promoters for for the convention here in Vegas, send an email out to everyone who had a ticket and said, If anyone has an interesting topic they’d like to talk about, you know, shoot us an email. And I thought as David David you think, you know, this Star Trek fans would like to hear about investing? It’s like, I mean, baby. Everybody likes talking about investing. Everybody needs money, right? So we shot him an email and said, Hey, we’re not in Star Trek. Right. There’s no money but you know, the Frankie’s do with gold press ransom.
David Johnson 53:02
We brainstormed ideas, you know, of, you know, put shields write your portfolio and
Brad Barrie 53:09
and that was that was one of the keys on why we did it was because you know, as a financial advisor. I know. Investing can be scary for investors. And there’s a lot of terminology. There’s a lot of jargon. People on CNBC moving fast using scary terms. And as a financial adviser, I always tried to speak plain understandable English because I wanted my investors, my clients to be comfortable. And if a confused investor is not a comfortable investor, right, so. So we went there with the goal of Let’s Talk in Star Trek language. Let’s talk in terminology that that everybody there can relate to
Jeff Malec 53:49
the whole pie next time. Yeah, we should. But
Brad Barrie 53:52
but one of the things I’ve always enjoyed going to the Star Trek conventions is there’s people from all over the world go to these conventions from all different races, creeds, political beliefs, you name it, and everybody gets along. Because everybody looks at what do we all have in common our love for science fiction and Star Trek. Let’s bond on that. put our differences aside and everybody gets along. Right, sort
Jeff Malec 54:16
of Gene Roddenberry’s idea in the first place, right? Exactly in space, we’re all equal and everyone’s committed.
David Johnson 54:22
I mean, Klingons, and humans can get along like, yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Malec 54:30
Yeah, when it happened, you spoke at the convention.
Brad Barrie 54:32
We spoke at the convention, we stood on the stage and spoke at the convention and you know, it was to individual investors retail. We did not have costumes on and we
David Johnson 54:45
did have a few Klingons in the audience. There
Brad Barrie 54:46
were some Klingons in the audience, actually, which is probably a first for financial Plock.
Jeff Malec 54:53
And give us some of the what were some of the corollaries
Brad Barrie 54:58
ah, shields around Your portfolio to protect yourself right? I mean, we talked about risk tolerance and understanding yourself. We did that we did a cute little quiz like, like who who would be, you know, the biggest risk taker in from a character standpoint? Right? And maybe it’s Worf. Maybe it’s Captain Kirk always out there taking risks, who would be the most conservative who’s the most nervous Nellie Star Trek character you can think of? And, you know, it was it was Barkley, if you remember, Barkley, next generation, always nervous and scared, right. And it’s
Jeff Malec 55:31
like, until he became super being became super being one of those,
Brad Barrie 55:35
you know, but but you can have a portfolio for a risk taker like war for Captain Kirk, and that works great for them. But you put that portfolio for Barkley who’s a nervous Nellie, it’s not going to work. So it’s understanding yourself understanding your risk tolerance, and then building that portfolio to fit you. Right. And I think we ended it with understanding that goals matter, right, and defining the problem, we shared David’s story about, you know, the capsule doesn’t have to be indestructible. It just has to get people back alive. So are you defining your financial goals correctly, and your financial goal should not be to beat the s&p 500 every year? Right? Your goal should be as Spock famously said, to live long and prosper. Right. And that’s the goal is to retire to send your kids to college to exactly right, live long and prosper. That’s what everybody you know, aspires to do. And you know, that, that, again, lines up with your correct risk tolerance. And so it was a fun presentation. We got great feedback from folks. And we’ll put
Jeff Malec 56:44
the link to the blog in the show notes. I’ve always wanted to, I would love to get in there be like, hey, they failed. Every series has failed. Want to risk management one on one, right? They’re not supposed to send the captain on away missions. He always goes on the webpage. Correct? Correct. But they and then in later ones, they would even quote it like, oh, sorry, Captain, you kick. I’m going how it
David Johnson 57:07
took Picard a while. Yeah. Before he got off the ship and
Jeff Malec 57:11
then you could have worked off someone like red shirt. Who’s the guy who’s gonna die in your portfolio? I don’t know who the red shirt is. Awesome, let’s I just want a few of your favorites. While we’re on the topic, favorite series.
Brad Barrie 57:31
Star Trek series Voyager for me, Voyager.
Jeff Malec 57:33
I
David Johnson 57:34
like the next generation.
Jeff Malec 57:36
Yeah, that would be my choice too. I thought you’re gonna go with the original since it inspired your early we
David Johnson 57:41
did. It did it has a special it’s not a it’s not in with the other category. Got it?
Jeff Malec 57:47
It’s a whole separate thing. And then there’s a serious Yeah. Favorite movie? tougher. Hmm. I’m gonna go with wrath on.
Brad Barrie 58:01
Wrath of Khan is is a great one. I like to swim with the whales.
Jeff Malec 58:09
Boy travel. And then the new ones are pretty good with Christopher Pyne. Yeah. JJ
Brad Barrie 58:12
Abrams ones are really good.
David Johnson 58:14
Yes. I really think that Ricardo Montalban should have won the Academy Award. I really I know, I’m not saying that. But I mean, the only reason he didn’t was because it was starcher. Yeah.
Jeff Malec 58:26
Because yeah, he was thrown 100 miles an hour. He was in sports parlance. And favorite character.
David Johnson 58:37
Oh, well, Kirk,
Jeff Malec 58:41
Captain Kirk, I think I’ll go data. And then yeah,
Brad Barrie 58:48
I would agree with any of those. I think the card you name it. It depends on the mood. Right? If you Yeah, he looks to me is one of the most hilarious characters. Right. And yeah, you know, but depends depends on your mood. Yeah.
Jeff Malec 59:00
And then do you guys ever have been in meetings where I say data, like data data, like Sorry, trek Star Trek fan? Well, human.
Brad Barrie 59:11
Yeah. It’s It’s David and I had a fun experience when we were launching the mutual fund and Okay, now we have to pick your ticker symbol. So what should what should our ticker symbol be? And, you know, we work in a Star Trek terminology.
Jeff Malec 59:23
And there’s something PHS solar, you
Brad Barrie 59:27
know, and I think we even looked at data or something, and I think it was taken or something like that. But yeah, it’s it’s data data. You know, we all know, it is what it is.
Jeff Malec 59:39
All right. We’ve taken up a lot of your time here. So any last thoughts for listeners?
Brad Barrie 59:46
No, we appreciate you guys. We appreciate you. Allowing us to speak and appreciate everything you do to help communicate the message on diversification and alternatives. And we love your analogies too. With with your logs in the Star Wars Star Wars analogy you have with the poster behind you. You know, there’s some some great ones there. You know, we have a blog we have. We have monthly updates for our fund, where we go through details on what’s working, what’s not. So feel free to go to our website dynamic WG isn’t dynamic wealth group dynamic wg.com. And you can always email us at info at Dynamic wg.com. And maybe we’ll put in the notes too. But, but yeah, we appreciate you.
Jeff Malec 1:00:34
Did you go into the Superbowl or any of the festivities are staying far away from that circus? Yeah,
Brad Barrie 1:00:40
I’m more of the one that stays far away from the circus. You know, God bless the people that come to Vegas and spend their money and keeps my taxes low and keeps the economy and all the wonderful people here employed.
Jeff Malec 1:00:55
So that was when did the bears last in it? Oh, five in Miami. It started raining. It was like 50 and it started raining sideways. And it was just as coldest I’ve ever been 50 degrees in Miami because you’re soaking wet and you’re thinking through my mind. Then they started losing. Like it’s gonna be four hours until I’m able to drive myself out. Right. I got to get through the stadium. Gotta get on a shuttle back to this parking lot. Back to the car. All the way back to the hotel. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It’s not all cracked up. Be soon as your team starts losing you like what am I doing? Why do I spend all this money? Yeah. But I’m sure it’ll be. It’ll be fun. It’ll be good. Great. Well, thank you guys. We’ll talk soon. And best of luck with everything. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Okay, that’s it for the show. Thanks to Brad. Thanks, David. Thanks RCM for sponsoring thanks to Jeff Burger for producing. Live long and prosper.
This transcript was compiled automatically via Otter.AI and as such may include typos and errors the artificial intelligence did not pick up correctly.
