April 5, 2021-On today’s podcast, we welcome special guest Alex Shahidi, Managing Partner and Co-Chief Investment Officer at Evoke Advisors and ARIS Consulting, a $19 billion registered investment advisor. Alex helps manage the RPAR Risk Parity ETF, which seeks to generate positive returns during periods of economic growth, preserve capital during periods of economic contraction, and preserve real rates of return during periods of heightened inflation.
On today’s podcast, Alex discusses:
- His journey in finance, moving from a successful career at Merrill Lynch to starting his own firm
- The basics of risk parity
- Why he launched a risk parity ETF
- Keys to success in the ETF business
- His top investment pick
- And more
Subscribe: iTunes| Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher | Overcast | YouTube | Amazon
Welcome investors to the Absolute Return Podcast. Your source for stock market analysis, global macro musings and hedge fund investment strategies. Your hosts Julian Klymochko and Michael Kesslering aim to bring you the knowledge and analysis you need to become a more intelligent and wealthier investor. This episode is brought to you by Accelerate financial technologies. Accelerate, because performance matters. Find out more at www.Accelerateshares.com.
Julian Klymochko: Welcome Alex to The Absolute Return Podcast. Pleasure to have you on the show today, we’re going to talk about risk parity, etfs, hedge fund strategies, and all that good stuff. But prior to getting into any specific investment strategies, I wanted to get into the background of your career and how you ended up running a Risk Parity Strategy. Specifically, you have 21 years of experience in the investment business. What initially made you catch the investing bug? What was the first thing that got you into finance and how did your career develop from that?
Alex Shahidi: Thanks for having me. It’s nice to see you both. So, my story is maybe not that different from most, at least from a high level, which is, I’m a numbers person and I love working and helping people, so investing and being a financial advisor, it was a very good fit for that. So that’s, I think initially what attracted me to the business, but also, I think the other thing is, and obviously passionate about investing. I think that goes without saying, but the other thing that I think is really interesting about what we do is, there’s an aspect of art and there’s an aspect of science. And I think if you’re too far in one end or the other, you miss a lot and that’s really attractive to me because I’m the type of person who gets attracted to things that have a very steep learning curve and that learning curve stays steep. When it flattens, I start to get a little bored and I’m looking to keep that learning curve steep and the world of investing and dealing with clients and investors and, you know, the kind of the art and science that encompasses all of that makes us a pretty unique industry where the learning curve is always steep.
Julian Klymochko: So, you started out at Merrill Lynch, had a successful start to career there and was there for, quite a while and built a successful practice. What made you kind of strike out on your own co-founding, with a business partner and, you know, becoming to what you are today? What was the spark, what was the idea behind that?
Alex Shahidi: Well, you know, let me just give you a little background for my approach. So, I started off by saying my story is, you know, fairly similar from a high level, but then it really diverges from here on out. I went to law school, I graduated, took the bar and passed. And a week later I started at Merrill Lynch, which isn’t a typical path for somebody who takes the bar exam.
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Alex Shahidi: But that was my passion. That’s what I wanted to do. Law was more from an educational perspective. It also teaches you to think in shades of gray, you know, whereas, you know, I’m a numbers person. So, I see the world in black and whites and law school teaches you the shades of gray. And that’s a really good balance for developing a practice in our industry.
So, I get to Merrill Lynch, I’m really excited. And they give you a phone and a computer and they say, go get clients. And then I started realized, you know what, this is not so much an investment, you know, mindset. It’s more of like a marketing, it’s more marketing oriented, which I understand because the value is in getting clients. And so, when you look around the industry the people who tend to be the most successful and those who survive, tend to be really good salespeople, and they’re good at communicating to clients, building relationships and they’re less oriented towards the investment side. And I’m more of an investor, I’m not marketing oriented at all. And so that immediately set me on a very different path. And so, I came in and they tell you, you know, if you’re spending more than 10% of your time in the office, you’re on the wrong track.
Because you need to be out of the office getting clients. And I thought, you know, I need to be really good at what I do. I need to get my arms around investing and develop a strategy. So, I spent 90% of my time in the office, but it almost the exact opposite of what they taught you. And I spent a lot of time getting designations, you know, like the CFA, the SEMA, CFP, cause its structure form of learning. I read everything I could. I was probably reading 14 to 16 hours a day. I try to find people who I thought were insightful, learn from them. And that to me is a very different approach than what I’ve seen in the industry. And so, what it did is it put me in a very different place where I viewed myself as an independent advisor that just happened to be working at Merrill Lynch and they have great tools and resources. But I spent my time trying to find what I thought was the best insight and share that with my clients. So, I did that for 15 years and Meryl gave me a lot of flexibility. I was managing over $10 billion dollar in assets there. And that worked out for a long time until we got to about 2014, when I felt I needed more tools in my toolkit in order to properly manage client portfolios. We’ll talk about how I think about that in a second. And so, it was time to depart and launch my own firm with my partner Damien Bisserier who was at Bridgewater for about a decade. So, we’d been talking about working together for seven, eight years, and finally the stars aligned. He left Bridgewater, I left Merrill and we launched our firm ARIS in 2014.
And then basically I was able to transition my clients over. It was a continuation of what I was doing before, but now I had the flexibility to create new tools. You know, so for example, we launch an ETF. We create co-mingled vehicles. I published the book that was, you know published by Wiley that came out in 2014. So, a lot of things have happened since then. And then more recently we merged with another firm called Evoke Advisors, and it’s a group that I had known for 15 years. I with them at Merrill, I led by David Hou and Mark Seer. And, so we merged together. So now we’re a $20 billion dollar RA in Los Angeles. So that’s kind of my career in a nutshell,
Julian Klymochko: And sounds like things are going fantastic with $20 billion in AUM managed accounts, sort of spun off from Merrill Lynch. And then there’s the concept of two concepts. Number one is an ETF. Number two is risk parody. So, you launch the RPR Risk Parity ETF. How did that come about? And what was the idea behind launching risk parody within an exchange traded fund?
Alex Shahidi: Sure. So, a step back to provide a little context. So, this idea of risk parody, and I think of that as just a balanced portfolio is something that I’ve been following and implementing for clients on a separate account basis for about 15 years. And these are concepts that I learned originally from Bridgewater. They have a strategy; they have been doing this for a long time. This is how Ray Dalio, their founder manages his family’s wealth and so on.
Julian Klymochko: That’s the all-weather, the Bridgewater, all weather strategy, right?
Alex Shahidi: That’s correct. And so, when I first was introduced to that concept. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I did about two years of research trying to get my arms around, does this really make sense? I ended up writing a book about it. They actually helped me. They provided data; they gave me feedback.
Julian Klymochko: And what’s the book?
Alex Shahidi: It’s called Balanced Asset Allocation.
Julian Klymochko: Okay, great.
Alex Shahidi: It came out in 2014 and by the way, we’re doing an update currently, and that one will come out later this year which is more direct to the risk parity fund that we have. I’ve been doing this for a long time. And one thing that I learned is there’s a lot of challenges with implementing a strategy like that. And I’ll describe what the strategy is, but difficult to do on an individual basis for clients. And so over the last few years we’ve been exploring is there a better way to do this? Can we be more efficient? And we figured out, okay, if we take the strategy and we put it inside of a vehicle, then there’s implementation efficiencies, obviously because we can just manage one vehicle rather than individual portfolios, but we discovered all these other efficiencies. There’s a there’s tax efficiency, there’s lower costs, you get great liquidity, you can lever at near zero cost. There are all these advantages, which I’ll get into. But by taking what we were already doing, putting it inside of a vehicle and then using that for our clients gained a lot of efficiencies. And most importantly, it gave us the ability to be more balanced than we were before. And so that’s the genesis for why we came up with the idea and why we did.
And, you know, a large percentage of the assets in there are from our clients that we shared the story with them, they thought it made sense. But it’s grown way beyond that, and part of it is because we, obviously, you don’t know this in advance, but we launched it right before a global pandemic. And normally when you launch something before a global pandemic, unless you happen to be in the exact right industry, like Zoom, for example, you just, you know, it’s usually not good timing. And so, in this case, it was perfect timing because there’s a philosophy which I’ll describe of being able to protect in a downturn, participate in up markets with a very simple strategy that anybody can understand and we put it into the world right before the global pandemic. So, in one year which is 2020, you basically saw the Covid of, let’s say a three-year bear market in three months. And then you saw, you know, maybe a seven-year bull market in three quarters. And so, you got one year of the live track record, but it’s like 10 years of experience. So, you got to test it because you got, you know, one of the worst declines, the steepest decline, is one of steepest in history. And then you’ve got this unbelievable rebound even while the pandemic raged on. And that turn is really difficult to predict. So, all these things you get to throw in to a short time period, and it succeeded during, you know, through that you know, downturn and recovery. And I think that’s one of the reasons the assets are, you know, also 1.2 billion now, is because 1) the concept is easy to understand and transparent and 2), it kind of proved itself in a relatively short period of time.
Michael Kesslering: So, for some of our listeners that aren’t really familiar with what risk parody is, can you just describe some of the basics and why it would be deserving of a spot in an investor’s portfolio?
Alex Shahidi: Sure. I think the way to think about it is, is from a high level, is we’re trying to solve a very important problem that all investors face. So, one is you want high returns. So, think of it like equity, like returns, you want controlled risk, low fees, low taxes and liquidity. That’s, you know, very simple requests, right? Just give me all those things and I’ll be happy. And I think that’s actually doable within this construct. So low fees, low taxes, liquidity, if you just take whatever your strategy is, put it in an ETF, you get that. Okay, but equity like returns with controlled risk. So how do you get equity, like returns or controlled risk over the long run? So, you’re investing for, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. How do you build something that gets you there?
I think the starting point, you have to think of it from a blank slate. So, forget everything you know, so if you the average investor, you know, you have 50 years to invest, what do you buy? They say, you buy stocks and you don’t look at it ever again, and don’t sell low, just hold on. I think there’s a better way. And so, the concept here basically is trying to achieve equity-like returns with controlled risk by taking two key steps. One is, which asset classes do you select for your portfolio? And then the second step is how do you structure the asset classes? Okay, so going back to step one. We want a portfolio that is diverse, okay. Because we’re trying to control risk. So, you pick asset classes that go up and down at different times. Okay, so it’s really as simple as that. And the way to think about that is, is to recognize that the main driver of asset class returns is the economic environment.
It’s not, you know, much else, it’s, you know, for example, the economy collapses, you know, growth falls, you already know that equities are going to do poorly. And you know, that things like treasuries will do well. So, this is what happened in Q1 of last year. If inflation is the big driver, so like the 1970s. If inflation surprises to the upside, then that is good for certain assets and it’s bad for other assets. And so, if you think in those terms, you just not even thinking about correlation. You’re not thinking about anything else. You’re just thinking of fundamentally, which assets are buys to do well when growth is rising and which are biased to do alone when growth is falling and which assets are biased to do well, when inflation is rising and inflation is falling, and this is all relative to what’s already discounted. What’s really interesting is, it’s about 50/50 in terms of which way the economy goes.
But half the time it outperforms expectations and half the time it underperforms. So, it’s really hard to predict, you know, which of these things is going to happen. So, recognizing that the economic environment is what is the main driver. Pick asset classes that do well in different environments. So, we pick four, its equities, commodities, tips, and treasuries. Okay, so equities do well when growth is rising and inflation is falling. Commodities do well when inflation is rising and growth is rising. And then within commodities, there’s two, there’s gold, which is a store holder wealth. And then there are the producers like, energy, miners, agriculture. Those two, a little bit differently during growth. So, when growth is rising, it’s good for commodity producers. Like, like this year, they’re doing really well. They got crushed in Q1 of last year and the opposite for gold.
So gold was up in Q1 of last year and is down this year, so that all makes sense. And then tips have the opposite bias of equities. They do well when the economy is weak and when inflation is rising, like the 1970s would have been a great time for tips. And then you have treasuries, which nobody likes because the yield is low. But what’s interesting about treasuries is, is they do well when the economy is weak and they do well when inflation is falling. So, heading into Q1 of last year, nobody wanted to own treasuries. It was the best performing asset, right? And if you go back to Japan, the last 30 years, it has been one of the best performing assets, actually in the world, even though yields were low because you got an economic collapse, deflationary depression. So, pick four asset classes, because they’re the reliably diverse.
You don’t even have to predict which one’s going to do well or poorly. You just know that they’re going to zig and zag at different times. So, step one, pick the classes that are diverse. You’re not worried about what the returns are, right? You just know that they’re diverse. Step two is structure each to have a similar return and risk. And so, what I mean by that is, is that if you can take these asset classes rather than taking them as there, pre-packaged you think of it a little bit more thoughtfully, where each of them, if you’re investing for a hundred years, you should expect similar returns and risk. And so, you can do that fairly easily. So, equity is obviously having an equity like return and risk. Commodities, rather than buying commodity futures. We buy commodity pruser equities that over 50 years of beat equities by 2% a year.
But because they act too much like equities, you’ve combined it with gold bullion. And those two combined, in gold is uncorrelated to equities, obviously. And those two combined, when you put them together, you have a commodity basket that has an expected return and risk that’s comparable to equities. So now you’ve got equities with equity, like return on risks. Commodities with an equity like return risk, then tips and treasuries are normally lower returning lower risk assets. There is two levers you can pull. You can raise the return [Audio gap 00:16:24-29] longer relation bonds. This is, you know, everybody’s going shorter duration these days. I’m saying to be balanced, you should go longer duration. It’s the opposite of what the current tendency is. And you do that to increase the return and increases the risk, but that’s not enough because that’s not enough to get to equity like risk. So, you add a modest amount of leverage. And if you do that and you go back a hundred years, treasuries and equities have the same returning risk, right? Tips and equities can have similar returning risks. Okay, now you have four asset classes that, you know are diverse. Each of which has a similar returning risk over the long run. And now you just balance across all of them. And you constantly rebalance, which is a repeat process of buying low, selling high, which can add another half a percent of 1% on average over time. And so that’s the conceptual framework. And then you just buy indexes for those underlying components, and you’re just rebalance. And in a period, you know, of you know, a downturn like Q1 of last year, treasuries did really well, as you would expect, gold and tips were up, commodities and equities got crushed and the ETF was down 4%, right? In Q1, market was down 21. Then the reverse happened, and what was the worst, the first quarter. Equities and commodities were the best, the next three quarters. What was the best in the first quarter? Treasuries was the worst, the next three quarters as interest rates rose. And the ETF was up about 25% of the last three quarters and finished the year up a little over 19%. So, protect on the downside, participate on the upside. And there was no timing aspect at all. It’s just maintaining balance.
Michael Kesslering: And so, when you look at your investor base and kind of your target market that the strategy would be suitable for. Where are you seeing that? Are you seeing it being most popular amongst institutional investors and family offices, as you had mentioned, Ray Dalio using it to manage his own wealth, as well as their firm’s strategy? Are you seeing it more on the institutional side or is there a real use case in retail as well?
Alex Shahidi: Yeah, you know, we’ve seen a mix where high net worth clients tend to really like it because there’s a very strong tax efficient argument for mixing, you know, multiple asset classes inside of a single ETF vehicle, because you can effectively rebalance without generating cap gains. And so, for high net worth, that’s very attractive. For institutions it’s attractive because it’s a low-cost way to get exposure to a diverse set of asset classes. And so, we’re seeing interest across both of those dimensions so far.
Julian Klymochko: I wanted to get a bit into the weeds, Alex, on how the strategy works. specifically, you mentioned the four asset classes, equities, treasuries, commodities, and tips. Now, do you have an outlook on each of these? I know this is a mechanical systematic strategy. Actually, let me rephrase that perhaps because each one of these asset classes performs well in a different environment. Do you have a forecast for what sort of environment we’re heading into that would drive returns for each one of these asset classes?
Alex Shahidi: You know, it’s a great question. You know, the answer for the most part is, we do have our opinions, but the strategy doesn’t reflect that. And the reason is, is that our experiences it’s really hard to time these things consistently well, and so the strategy here is to effectively build a neutral portfolio that is indifferent to what the economic outcome is because it’s equally balanced across all those different environments. So, for the most part, it doesn’t really care, right? And it’s not necessarily biased to do well or poorly in any of those environments. And so, we think of this as kind of a core allocation where you’re equally allocated across all these economic outcomes.
Then if you want to express a tilt, you can do it outside of the ETF. And to us, that’s a, I think a very good way to do it because everybody has different views. Number two, we have much greater conviction in the benefits and viability of being well balanced and diversified than we do in any single bets, because you’re going to be right more often than not by betting on diversification than you are in your individual convictions of what’s going to happen next. And as we’ve seen, you know, completely, you know, unexpected things can happen. We just went through two major ones, right? You had a global pandemic where the unemployment rate quadrupled in two months, nobody expected that six months earlier and the stock market fell 33% in five weeks. Okay, so that was really hard to anticipate. Then you had this unbelievable recovery while all the pandemic was raging on. The bottom was in, you know, was a year ago.
Like how could you see that happening? And if you miss those major inflection points on the way down, on the way up, that could wipe out years of picking, you know, guessing correctly. And so, I think there’s a very valuable lesson from last year where unexpected things can happen. If you try to time, you’re going to miss some times. And those misses could be very painful. And so, if you have something that, you know, can be down 4% and up 19 and a half in a year like that, without having to guess at all, right? That tells you something as far as the value of kind of just being neutral all the time.
Michael Kesslering: So, you mentioned earlier that step one of developing a risk parity strategy is to pick a diverse set of asset classes. How would you go about thinking into the future about adding a new asset class as, the investing landscape changes?
Alex Shahidi: Yeah, that’s a great question. If we were sitting here talking, you know, 25 years ago, tips hadn’t been invented yet, at least in the U.S. and it’s a tremendous asset class because it has the opposite bias of equities. And so, I think it would make sense to always be open to adding asset classes because more diversification is typically better. But the key is, is to really understand what its economic biases, because when you throw these things into your portfolio, what you want to be mindful of is to not overweight any economic outcomes. So, you’ll notice one of the things that I did not mention in our asset classes is corporate bonds, which is a very popular asset class. We don’t include it because it has the same bias as equities. It does well when the economy’s doing well. And it does poorly when the economy is doing poorly and it has a similar inflation bias.
And so, it doesn’t really add a lot by adding it into the portfolio. So, it’s not so much about throwing more asset classes in, it’s more about adding asset classes that are truly diverse that zig and zag at different times. And so, if something like that comes along, I certainly think it would be something that might be worth consideration. And then you can think of cryptocurrency as a potential in that regard. You know, we have gold, maybe it’s a good diversifier to gold. It’s still, you know, gold has a couple thousand-year head start on cryptocurrency which is about 10 years old. But something like that could find its way into the portfolio. Once, you know, it doesn’t swing around as much and has more institutional ownership and, you know, all the other things, but definitely something to consider.
Julian Klymochko: It’s interesting, the notion of including additional asset class, it’s obviously looking at correlations, return drivers, return expectations and such, but digging into RPAR. It’s been incredibly successful in the market, launched in 2019. Now gathering 1.2 billion in assets in a relatively short amount of time. What are the keys to success in being successful in ETFs? What did you find really worked for you guys?
Alex Shahidi: Besides the lucky timing of, you know, right before a global pandemic and doing well through that, which is hard to replicate. I’d say probably the most important thing is to have a strategy that is, first of all, sound and two, that you can explain in simple terms that anybody can understand and you have a transparent approach that is easy to follow and easy to understand how it’s performing, you know, what is in there and why, and why it’s performing as it is. I think that’s the key to long-term success because I think most investors are prone to chasing returns. Something goes up in the rear view, mirror, their eyes get attracted to it, and they want to buy it. And then when it goes down, they sell it and they look for the next thing that’s done well, and that doesn’t generally lead to good long-term returns. If you took an honest assessment of chasing returns, it has a terrible track record. And so, our goal is to have something that’s simple, that’s easy to understand, that’s transparent. And it has an approach that intuitively makes sense to get investors, to buy into the concept. Then they’re less prone to want to sell when it’s underperforming and less prone to add when it’s performing and hopefully have the opposite. Meaning when it’s outperforming, maybe a trim a little bit, when it’s underperforming, you add a little bit and over time that actually leads to even better results. And so, I think that’s a big part of what I think is under-appreciated in our industry is I think there’s a tendency to try to make things sound more complicated than they really are. And there are strategies that the investors really don’t know what they own.
They’re just happy when it’s doing well and upset when it’s doing poorly. And I think if you can explain things and have a simple story with a, you know, a track record and transparency and repeatedly try to educate your investors then that can lead to long-term success. That’s one of the reasons we’re doing another edition of the book, just because I want people to, who are interested in learning about what the risk parity approaches is, they can read it and understand everything they need to know, and, you know, hopefully that’ll make them, you know, long-term investors and holders of the strategy.
Julian Klymochko: And in terms of track record, were you running the strategy prior to launch
The ETF?
Alex Shahidi: Yeah, we were doing it for individual clients for a long period of time. And I mean, you could just look at these asset classes over, you know, some of them have been around 50 years, some of them 100 years, and you could just look at their returns and you can see the periods where they do well, the periods that they do poorly. And if you just take this diverse mix of asset classes, you could just look at the numbers yourself and see that they do well at different times. You know, people remember the bull market of the equities the last 10 years, but often they forget the previous 10 years, the 2000 of that decades, equities were negative for decades and commodities were actually the best thing to own. In the last decade, everybody remembers commodities were terrible, so nobody wants to own them now, and equities are the best, but these things, flip-flop all the time, you know, in the 1970s equities and treasuries, underperformed cash for a decade and gold was up 30% a year, right? And then just when you think that’s the thing to own, the next 20 years, gold was negative for 20 years, right? So, this is, it’s not easy picking what’s going to do the best, you know, and so being diversified across all of them prevents you from being, you know, outperforming the best asset class, but also prevents you from underperforming. And your kind of in the middle and the middle is a great place to be because it’s a much more stable return stream, especially if you can, you know, have equity like returns over a very long period of time.
Julian Klymochko: Yes, certainly the balanced approach makes sense. Conceptually, obviously what we run into as investors is, you know, everyone wants to pick the next hot thing. Everyone wants to speculate. So, Alex, I want to put you on the spot here. If you could only hold a one investment for the next 10 years, excluding RPAR Risk Parity, what would it be and why?
Alex Shahidi: That was going to be my answer. So, you took that away.
Julian Klymochko: Let’s assume it’s RPAR and then something else.
Alex Shahidi: Sure. you know, at first, I would say, I give it, you know, this might be like a 55% conviction level as opposed to throwing a dart and be 50%. But I think commodities probably look relatively attractive. And the reason I say that is because one they’ve, you know, if you just look at what’s done the worst, oftentimes that’s the best, the next period. And that’s been one of the worst places to be the last decade. Two is you’re starting to see inflation pressures emerge and you know, more limited supply of commodity. So those dynamics seem to be leading towards you know, supply demand, mismatch, and you know, we’ll see what happens.
Julian Klymochko: Okay, great. I like that call. Would it be hard to imagine commodities doing well as you indicated the 2000, they had a knockout of a decade, but have really been crashed over the previous decade, ultimately, who knows, bounced approach makes sense. So, prior to letting you go today, where can potential investors find more about RPAR in addition, and tell us about the book?
Alex Shahidi: Sure. the website is rparetf.com. We’re constantly updating it with information. We’re trying to educate our clients. We do a quarterly webcast. We send out monthly emails. We, just want educated investors because I want them to know what they own and why they own it. We also have our advisory website evokeadvisors.com. We have a lot of contents on there. We’re very focused on providing educational material. And the book is called Balanced Asset Allocation that came out of 2014. There’s a risk parody book that’s coming out later this year that I’m still in the middle of writing, but that’s kind of the second edition of the first one.
Julian Klymochko: Well, the pandemic is a great time to be writing a book I suppose, but Alex, thank you for coming on the show today. Really great insights into risk parody and your success in finance thus far in your career, and look for continued success in the future. So, thank you very much, we enjoyed the discussion.
Alex Shahidi: I did as well. Thank you for having me.
Julian Klymochko: All right. Take care.
Alex Shahidi: Thank you, you too.
Thanks for tuning in to the Absolute Return Podcast. This episode was brought to you by Accelerate Financial Technologies. Accelerate, because performance matters. Find out more at www.AccelerateShares.com. The views expressed in this podcast to the personal views of the participants and do not reflect the views of Accelerate. No aspect of this podcast constitutes investment legal or tax advice. Opinions expressed in this podcast should not be viewed as a recommendation or solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities or investment strategies. The information and opinions in this podcast are based on current market conditions and may fluctuate and change in the future. No representation or warranty expressed or implied is made on behalf of Accelerate as to the accuracy or completeness of the information contained in this podcast. Accelerate does not accept any liability for any direct indirect or consequential loss or damage suffered by any person as a result relying on all or any part of this podcast and any liability is expressly disclaimed.
