20/20 Money Episode #38 – Reality vs Entertainment: Understanding Market Declines and Financial Pornography

Hello, and welcome to this episode of 20/20 Money! My guest on today’s show is Jeff Smith.

Jeff is a long time friend of mine and works as what is known in the investment world as a “wholesaler,” which means that it’s his responsibility to communicate primarily to other investment professionals that work with clients what his company is doing to understand the markets.

This is a unique episode, though, as we record it “on location”…not from an investment conference or stock exchange, but from the world’s largest general aviation fly-in in Oshkosh, WI. We both knew the other was going to be attending the event and I’ve wanted to have Jeff on the show because he brings a unique perspective to the topic of investments as he’s worked on “both sides” of the business—first as an investment advisor himself working directly with investors and now as a wholesaler for a large fund manager, where he spends the majority of his time talking as I said with other investment professionals and helping them help their clients with all things investment related.

In this conversation, in between the noise of airplanes in the background, we start out talking about how one defines their own investment philosophy and also how one can understand the investment philosophy of their own financial professional. We talk about what an investor should do when the markets get a bit choppy and have a good discussion around some metaphors that help explain the process of investing and connecting a timeline to your investment plan.

That serves as a good catalyst, because we then talk about (and get pretty passionate) about talking about the “talking heads” on TV and why we call it “financial pornography” and what it means to investors. We wrap up the conversation with Jeff sharing a couple of his favorite stories in his career and his answer to the one question we ask every listener.

As a reminder, you can get all the information discussed in today’s conversation by visiting our website at integratedpwm.com and clicking on the Learning Center. While there, you can also set up a 15min pre-discovery conversation to learn a little bit more about what it means to work with our firm or check out any number of additional resources, including our ebooks as well as our newest resource, which is a recorded, on-demand webinar that teaches ODs the top planning considerations and strategies for private practice owners.

And with that introduction, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jeff Smith.

Resources:

Keys To a Stock Market Decline

How Fund Flows Correlate to Performance

Key Questions for the Long Term Investor

Controlling What You Can Control

Callan Chart of Periodic Investment Returns

The Perils of Market Timing

FINRA Broker Check and Firm Look-up