November 8, 2021 – On today’s podcast we welcome special guests Todd Degelman and Chad Pruden of Wellington-Altus Private Wealth where Todd is Founder, Senior Investment Advisor, and Vice-Chairman, and Chad is Senior Investment Advisor. Wellington-Altus is one of the fastest-growing wealth advisory companies in Canada.
- On the show, Todd and Chad discuss:
- Their career backgrounds and keys to success in wealth management
- Their outlook for equity markets, bonds and inflation
- Asset allocation and what is top of mind for high-net worth investors
- What differentiates Wellington-Altus from the big banks
- And more
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Transcript:
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: I’m excited to have Todd and Chad from Wellington-Altus Private Wealth on the show today to chat about everything markets, asset allocation, investment advisory, all the fun stuff, all the stuff that is top of mind for investors these days. So, thanks guys for coming on the show. I want to start off with just a quick overview on each of your backgrounds, specifically your career trajectory, your current role at Wellington-Altus Private Wealth. And just to give our listeners and audience a quick rundown of just, you know, where you’ve been and where you’re at currently. So, Todd, do you want to start out?
Todd Degelman: Sure, sure. My background, I started the business in 1994. I was trained and worked at ScotiaMcLeod for about seven years. Then I met a guy named Charlie Spiring who just started at Wellington West back then, and jumped on board with them to not only bring my practice over, but to help build that company with them. Spent six, seven years on the road taking that company from 700 million to 10.3 billion. We ended up selling it to National Bank. I spent six years with handcuffs, to stay with them after the sale and found out quite quickly that the only thing worse than being at a bank own firm was getting the chance to be an independent and coming back to the bank owned firm quite fully realized it was time to open up our company again. April, 2017, I co-founded, Wellington-Altus with Charlie Spiring and Sean Hauser. In four years, we built a company from zero to, for reaching right around 18 billion of assets and you know, on the road to 40, 50 billion, so we’re just having a great time building something pretty unique.
Julian Klymochko: Okay, great. And Chad, how about yourself?
Chad Pruden: Yeah, so I started out in the bank channel as well, it was like 2007. So, it’s just a great time to start as an investment advisor. I got a lot of life lessons, real, real fast. So, I worked in the bank channel for just shy of 10 years and that just felt the same kind of pressures, you know, had a lot of clienteles where you’re trying to be all things to all people and that’s a hard process to run. So was looking, you know, traditional way to go, kind of through your big bank brokerages and heard of this goofy guy named Todd Degelman. And so, I thought I’d come and have an interview with him. And he kind of said all the right things and decided to take a complete 180 and go into the independent channel. And haven’t looked back since, so it’s been a good journey and I think it just evolves with how the world’s moving too. So, it was a good fit.
Julian Klymochko: I really, I really wanted to focus on how the being independent is dramatically different than being at one of the big Canadian banks. But prior to that, just wanted to clarify that Wellington-Altus is effectively, you know, the second edition, the first one Wellington West, which was obviously very successful. So sold for a ton of money to National Bank, started up Wellington-Altus a number of years ago. And, you know, kind of not necessarily redoing the same playbook, but building something from scratch and into something large, as you indicated currently 18 billion on your way to a 40 to 50 billion. So, Canada is a very unique market environment in that you have this big bank consortium, this quasi oligopoly that tends to dominate investment advisory services, distribution, et cetera. What are some of the key features and benefits of being independent and then, Wellington-Altus specifically, and how does that benefit clients?
Todd Degelman: Yeah, no, great question. And probably about five questions within that question, but you know, for the clients itself and I think that’s the number one thing. When we thought about creating a different firm and an independent firm, you know, instead of always reporting to the shareholder, you know, why don’t we report to the client and why don’t we invert that triangle? And if we do what’s right by the clients, buyers would do well, management will do well, the company do well. So, you know, that’s kind of the philosophy. Just over care, drive the client experience to the best that we can. And if we can do right by the client, you know, the firm will take care of itself and others will come, you know, in terms of specific things that I think are positive to be an independent, you know, number one, we don’t sell any proprietary products. You know, you don’t go to a bank and get sold to bank mutual fund, you know, we’re on the same side of the coffee table as the client. There’s no tied selling, you know, the one thing that frustrates me so much nowadays is we actually pick up the phone and I know every time I call a bank, I could never get the guy I want to talk to.
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Todd Degelman: Just trying to care more, you know, we can make decisions on the spot. We don’t have to go through three levels of management to get authorization which holds things up and increase time delays where it’s very much a team approach that slash, I always call it the Wellington family. We celebrate everybody’s wins and successes and we try to truly help each other. And if you have that team approach, you know, you can look at any good sports team, the teams that win the Stanley Cup or the Superbowl, or the guys that play like a team. And there’s an additional level of excellence that happens when you’re a team player and, you know, that’s our model. And you can only do that if you have a culture, that’s truly cares about the guy in the desk next door you, and happy for his wins. Technology is leading edge; you get the benefit of starting a new platform. Obviously, you get cloud-based type of products and software’s that you might not get at the bank because they’re using these old Freightliners I used to say, we’re a little speedboat that are very agile. It can move around these Freightliners really quickly. And in the end, we get to pick who we want to work with. So, a guy like Chad, he’s obviously at all-star, you know, a great talent. I want to find talented people. I want to find talented people out there that are entrepreneurial minded. And if you have that you’re going in the right direction.
Michael Kesslering: Then moving a little bit to where we are at in terms of the current market environment. Equities have been on a tear since March of 2020, kind of in the depths of the COVID pandemic, they’ve been, you know, a very much a V-shaped recovery. Now, a little bit of equities rolling over now in September of 2021 and into October, what’s your outlook for the equity markets moving forward?
Chad Pruden: Run, no, I’m just joking. I think it, such a tough question, you know, I really believe that, you know, you should build a risk portfolio. So instead of focusing on, you know, equities go up and down, I think you should, you know, get the asset allocation right. And that’s very boring and you probably just lost half your listeners now, but, you know, I think it’s been lost. I think you’re right. We’ve been in this straight one regime style for so long. Like we’ve been in this one quadrant of you know, high growth, low inflation for a long time. And I think a lot of portfolios are set up that way. I think a lot of portfolios are still set up with two asset classes, stocks and bonds, and, you know, the problem is, they continue to do well.
And the hardest time to make a change in something is when it’s doing well. I think you got to, you know, we’re going to have to be careful, I think with valuations kind of creeping in, but going back to, you know, do we have a shift in the quadrant? You know, do we move from a, as I said a high growth, low inflation to heaven forbid us stagflation type of scenario, where we have high inflation, low growth, which is, you know, a really tricky one to get through. And we’ll see how, you know, the federal reserve handles that if he’s going to push, you know, inflation or is he going to push unemployment? Right. His he going to push job growth, and it sounds like he wants to push job growth. And it sounds like he thinks inflation is transitory and it’s not here to stay, but I think you should always be cautious.
I think you should always know your pain threshold. To be honest with you, I don’t know. I think, if you sit down with someone and they tell you where the stock market’s going to go, you should probably run pretty fast because I think ultimately nobody knows. Asset allocation, hasn’t been rewarded for so many years, and I think it’s going to come to fruition now too. Like if we start to see some downs and the downs actually stay like, you know, you go through COVID and you only have what, two, three weeks of pain and then it’s over, right. So, I think we need to take a look at that. I think rates continue to be, you know, probably something you should focus on.
Julian Klymochko: I’d be willing to bet that listeners of The Absolute Return Podcast love hearing about asset allocation, but I digress. You touched on some good points with respect to interest rates, a two-asset portfolio, and kind of the dangers of not necessarily being diversified. I did want to touch on the fixed income side of that equation because bonds, despite the 10 years being at 1.5%. Very low yield, significantly lower than inflation currently, which is obviously problematic. I was just wondering; how do you feel about fixed income in the current market environment?
Chad Pruden: So, I would say and Todd can chime in on this if he wants to, but to me, this is my biggest worry, you know, with the clientele that we deal with, if you’re a retiring individual and you need to make X and rate of return, it’s like, how much more juice can I get from this? You probably had lots of people on the podcast signing this story, and it’s been a hard call to get the rate the right call right. But, you know, I just think it has massive, massive implications go forward. You kind of alluded to it when inflation is higher than what you’re making. Your net after tax rate of return is negative. Do bonds act as a ballast anymore? You know, in 2018, you got a quick taste of what that was like when the market went down and, you know, your two-asset class diversification portfolio all went down.
And so, I think what happens is if you have low rates, what you have to do is you get pushed to areas that you don’t necessarily want to be. And so, do you get pushed to high yield? And, you know, but let’s say the current yield on a high yield bond indexes 5%, like in your 5% rate of return you to make, your still not quite, almost getting to your goal after tax, but you’ve now masked a portion of your portfolio that was supposed to be a ballast against for equities that now is becoming volatile like equities. So, I think, you know, the defined contribution pension plan is it going to be really, really tough? We just met a client the other day and, you know, 40% of their capital of, you know, a $6 million account is in a bond index fund. And does that give you any type of rate of return? So, to me, you could spend podcasts of podcasts on this topic. To me, it’s the biggest risk so far. I think equities are going to do their thing. But it’ll be the interest rate decision of how you have a sleep at night when portfolios broken down.
Julian Klymochko: Especially over the past 40 years, you’ve had the benefit in your bond portfolio of interest rates falling. And now year to date, 10 years gone from below a hundred basis points to now above 150 basis points. So, bonds have done poorly year to date. You’re still seeing inflows into bond funds, but it seems, and you know, many pros think that perhaps the great 40-year bond bull market is over and we could be in for a rising rate environment. So, wondering what your thoughts are because effectively, you know, when you’re thinking about fixed income, you’re implicitly making some sort of interest rate forecast. We have seen a trending up year to date and the inflation measures would give you the signal that perhaps that could continue. Do you have an outlook for interest rates in the longer term and you know, where do you think they would settle? Let’s say in the next few years.
Chad Pruden: So, I think again, it goes back to the equity question that extremely though to forecasts. If I had our chief economist on the call here, he would say, you know, lower for longer.
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Chad Pruden: I don’t think it’s something that where you can take, you know, we can take the bond purchasing away maybe a little bit, and we’ll see how that goes, but I don’t know if you can crank rates up really, really fast. So, I honestly don’t know the number, but I would say lower for longer. I don’t think a negative rate, a low-rate environment has been shown to work. If you look to Europe and things like that would have tried a negative interest rate isn’t going to work. So, I do think you need to look at your diversity, you know, if you get into asset allocation, which is like, you know, my true baby of my real passion of, I think you need to get right. Do you have to shift away from two position a portfolio?
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, it’s really good point on asset allocation. I do want to get into how you think about that, your asset allocation framework, but prior to that. One other market dynamic that I wanted your thoughts on was inflation, obviously coming in significantly higher than expectations. There’s this discussion of whether it’s transitory or not. Certainly, the nature of it is probably likely lasting longer than the central bankers have indicated. I was wondering, do you think that it makes sense for investors to have some inflation protection in their portfolios?
Todd Degelman: I don’t put inflation protects you, and I think inflation protection is just really common shares and buying good quality businesses. And I think that’s the best inflation protection on fixed income. We’re starting to use more unique strategies as alternatives to some of the fixed income we normally put in the accounts, but I haven’t used any inflationary, specific products or for my portfolios today.
Chad Pruden: I think inflation is a sticky one, too. You know, if you look at, you know, we’re seeing rising energy prices, supply chain disruption throughout the world. The one that’s kind of, I’ve been keeping my eye on is rent. You know, rent rates are 2000, you know, you couldn’t see rental rate increases, and now you’ve started to see that catch up really fast, like double digit growth in rent. So, I think that’s tricky. And then I think you have, you know, this wage debacle going on too, like where, you know, you can’t find people to come work. And so, do you have wage inflation, which I think could really start the question to get it rolling. You know, someone working at Uber or DoorDash or SkipTheDishes can make 30 bucks an hour.
You know, nobody wants to go do the blue-collar jobs that make 15, 16 bucks an hour. So, there’s a pretty big gap of where I think things have to come up to. And if you look at wage growth at 3 to 4%, that works in the current regime of this low inflation, but it sure as heck does not work in a high inflationary environment. So again, chief economist does believe inflation is transitory. But inflation is tricky because inflation is like a rubber band wrapped around a brick and you pull and pull and pull and the brick doesn’t move. And then all of a sudden it snaps and it goes, so I like Todd’s point. I think, you know, are you running a prediction portfolio?
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Chad Pruden: And that’s the great thing, is like, we don’t run prediction portfolios. I think it’s incredibly hard to predict. We run risk portfolios, and so if that’s a risk that we want to be cautious of, I think we can make tilts in the portfolio. And it’s been a tricky call. If you’ve made a bet into gold, you know, loss a little bit, you kind of got your clock cleaned a little bit too, because it’s been a pretty volatile asset class. And are you getting a risk premium that you are from gold when you could go into another equity or another asset class?
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, and I think that’s a good lesson for investors is prediction is basically impossible when you’re trying to predict inflation, rates, equity, risk premium, any exoticness macro events that are really unforeseeable, whether it’s a global pandemic or a great financial crisis. Really knowing had foreseeing those are the ones that do are basically calling for some sort of bear market every year and are consistently wrong. So, it makes sense to have that risk portfolio as you indicated, or an asset allocation framework.
Chad Pruden: Just on that point Julian, because that’s the tricky thing when it comes to investing, that’s a tricky thing if you have client listen to this podcast, or, you know, one of our clients it’s like, how do you do the due diligence? Like if you’re a predicting portfolio, was it something that, you know, was researching got right? Or was it luck, right? The tricky thing with investing is you can have like the absolutely worst designed portfolio and the market can take a slight V and reward that risk.
Julian Klymochko: Yeah.
Chad Pruden: And you know, is that good? You know, if you’re an engineer and you build a bridge and the bridge collapses, you know who to go after.
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Chad Pruden: Right, here, it’s tricky because you don’t know the underlying risk. And did the risk get paid off? The tricky thing right now is investing is, bad decisions can be rewarded all the time and good ones not, and it’s hard to stick to the course when someone else’s bad decisions getting rewarded and my good decision isn’t, and it’s hard to stick the course because we live in like this fire hose of information nowadays, and you turn your head one way and you know, Facebook and Instagram are up for six hours yesterday. So, I wonder how many people lost information and had to make their own judgment calls. So, I think it’s tricky as the client now is what to believe. And that is a very, very hard point.
Julian Klymochko: And hopefully investors aren’t getting their advice from Instagram these days are TikTok, those channels, but they seem to be popular with the younger type investor. Some interesting things that I like talking about is the notion of say you are the perfect predictor of overarching macro themes, for example, inflation, or, you know, some sort of pandemic. The ability to select the right security and know exactly how it’s going to play out. That’s extremely difficult. It’s like, you know, if someone told you inflation was going print north of 5%, would you expect the 10-year yield to be like 1.53%? It’s like, no, no one would think that, but that’s what happening.
Chad Pruden: That’s a great point. And there’s a great article and I can share it with you. I don’t know if you have shownotes or what, but I can’t remember who did it, but like over the past 90 years up until like 2019, don’t quote me on the numbers exactly. But I think 86% of the stocks in the S&P 500 accounted for 16 trillion in wealth creation.
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Chad Pruden: 96% of stocks, underperformed T-bills, again, until 2019. So, like the question is, are you smart enough to pick the 4%? And if you look at the names that have caused it, you know, there’s been a handful of names. So, I think just to tack onto your point, I just think that’s such a great statistic is, we always want to try and have the winner, but you know, you have to get it right twice. You’ve got to buy it and sell it, and you have a motion on both ends of it. And that’s what investors are going to face right now. So, you’re all low for equity markets. You should just probably buy, but you’ll always have a grit, your teeth moment. You’ll never not have a grit your teeth moment. Market can be down, oh my gosh, it’s going lower. Market’s high, oh, it’s only going to go down. And so that’s where I think you got to get the risk right. It’s boring and complexity sells, and that’s where it gets tricky.
Michael Kesslering: So, who have you modeled some of your framework and your investment philosophy after?
Chad Pruden: Yeah, who do we model it after?
Julian Klymochko: Any Influences?
Michael Kesslering: Or is it just purely of your own creation?
Todd Degelman: Yeah, it is our creation. And when we set up a Wellington-Altus a second time and obviously a big part of my role is building the company, but Chad and I still run a very large booking business. And when I was thinking about going back and doing this again, I had the privilege that probably very few advisors ever get, and I probably interviewed more investment advisors across Canada than anybody else in Canada. I challenge anybody if they met more advisors than I have in the last 20 years, trying to get them to come to my company from Halifax Victoria. And what you get is a lot of cups of coffee and what you get is a lot of best ideas, and there’s a lot of terrible ideas in there, but there’s a lot of great ideas when you’re sharing some time together.
And what I try to do is take three or four of the best ideas that I had, put it together with Chad in deck that we felt comfortable doing. Before we started selling this idea to our clients, we entertained about three or four different accounting firms and presented it to them and said, okay, blow holes in it, break it up. You guys see this stuff all the time. Where are we at? And what happened was, we ended up getting four or five or six partners of major accounting firms becoming our clients. And we knew we had something. And from that point on, that’s the deck we use, that’s the presentation we use, and we’ve had great success with it.
Chad Pruden: Just to highlight on that point too, a great point is, you know, Todd’s been in the industry longer than I have, he’s learned more, you know, I came in at a tough time. So, I learned some hard lessons. Again, that’s that risk management approach comes from, you know, our primary clientele is someone who’s looking to make the transition from an accumulation phase to a de accumulation phase. And that’s a whole podcast in itself is the de accumulation topic, but we run the de accumulation portfolios for a lot of our clientele because we’ve got to start giving it back to them, which ultimately returns back to your very first question on the outlook for equities and volatility. And I think volatility and risk get mismatched all the time, you know, risk is the permanent loss of capital, volatility is the up and down in price.
So, you know, Todd, that’s been great for Todd and I, for me especially when we kind of merged our two books together. He really brought that piece to the game as he seems so much. And, you know, you could bring an idea to him and you can bet it pretty darn quick, cause he’s seen a lot of it. So, you know, that’s goes back to Todd’s team approach. I think you need to be a team. You need to look for really good talent. That’s why we look to you guys when it comes to setting up the portfolios, because there’s a lot of people, a lot smarter than me and, you know, Todd and I are quarterbacks. So, you know, we’ll set it up and embed it, but I don’t know, gone are the days I think of slinging individual stocks.
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, you know, we do come across that pretty often to be honest, but that’s more of the old school way, you know, the old school broker way where you sort of, you know, a gunslinger with respect to the individual securities. So, you see this massive divergence in styles and you know, how an investment advisor is supposed to operate now, for those, I wanted to pick your brain on something. For those say they’re new to the advisory business. What would you say are some keys to success to become a successful investment advisor?
Chad Pruden: Well, I let Todd jump on of this one first and I’ll end it.
Todd Degelman: You know, were lucky enough to be named top five adviser in Canada through three years of row by Wealth Professional. They asked this question all the time and you know, I think the first one is, you know, as long as I’ve been at advisor, do what’s right for the client and successful will follow, it’s probably the most important one. A lot of times you get too humpy on trying to bring in assets or do commission or do this or that, or trying too complicated, you know, my always thought was just really try to do what’s right for the client, the rest will follow, keep it simple, make it personal and have fun is probably the second one. And that’s on our microsites, those are three words. And that’s what I live by. Number two, you know, care more than your competition. When you’re in a meeting, your clients will just get it. They’re not going to understand all the jargon and philosophy and strategy, everybody likes to throw out there, just show that you really care and more than anybody else. That’s like gut feel and clients go with their gut. And number three, Chad mentioned already, create an all-star team. Like when you build a company like Wellington, all I’m looking for is talent. And on my team, all looking for his talent. So, create an all-star team, then try to make it even better. And those are my three rules to success as an advisor.
Chad Pruden: Great, in the industry, to be a successful advisor, I think it actually even applies to like everything in life, is you need to execute, execute, execute. I think you guys should get that tattooed on their forearm or something like that. I’ll never forget it because like, we all have the game plan. Like we all have it. I can share the financial plan. I can put you through it. You need to execute on it. You need to save this much money. This is the rate of return. You need to achieve, you to execute on that. You want to lose 15 pounds, 20 pounds. You need to execute, you have the plan, right? So, I think we get bombarded again by information and so many self-help books and they all start to say the same thing.
And at the end of the day, if you’re a young advisor, I’m staring out my window right now at two young guys who have just came aboard and these guys are going for it, right. They are pounding the phones, they’re getting out there and doing it, but what are they doing? They’re executing, executing, executing, executing on a daily basis. And my favorite quote is, commitment is doing the thing you said you were going to do long after the mood you said it in has left you. And I think if you can do that, when your motivation goes away, do you have consistency? And that’s probably, what’s made Todd one of the most successful guys that I know, is he’s the most motivated bleep, bleep, bleep person, you know, I know. The guy continues to go, he travels Canada, he runs a huge book. He’s just motivated to the nines. And that’s what kind of what I wanted to partner with somebody. That’s what I looked for is, you got to have someone who’s motivated to go. And I think you’re probably seeing it with you guys. You know, you guys are motivated to win. Julian has been great and you just got to keep pounding through it.
Michael Kesslering: So, another example of that motivation would be that the two of you host a YouTube channel called Todd Talks with Chad. I Definitely encourage our listeners to check it out. You do have a wide variety of interviews on there. For example, the favorite one that I came across was Marshall Faulk which is awesome to see from an advisor group in Saskatchewan. What has been your biggest takeaway from pursuing that project?
Chad Pruden: I’ll jump in on that one real quick. To me, it’s just varying opinion. I love it. I think our very first one was Michelle Romanow, and our audio wasn’t the best cause we were kind of just slinging into it at the start, but, you know, she had this great advice of, you know, how you make a lot of money concentration. How do you lose a lot of money concentration? And there’s a lady who started in the caviar business and swung the bat and missed, right. And, but, you know, stayed on it and now she’s, you know, extremely successful. And if you can ever listen to her speak, she’s phenomenal. Then you go to the Marshall Fault Podcast where he talks about, you know, where he came from. I love that. And then the Kaleb Dahlgren Podcast, which I thought was great to go through adversity.
So that’s what I love about the podcast is that, you know, everyone’s going through something, everyone needs some help. And I think there’s always tidbits of information throughout those podcasts, when we do it, it’s not all just finance. That’s why there are different people on it. But you know, I think it’s what you can apply from other people’s lives and try to apply it to your own. And that’s what I love about the podcast. And, you know, we’re making massive revenue off that. Like our 22 subscribers, like they’re diligent followers though. Like I went for groceries the other day and I got mocked.
Julian Klymochko: Hopefully we can double that for you from our audience here, but before I let you guys go. Fun question, if you could only hold a one asset for the next 10 years, what would it be and why?
Chad Pruden: Bitcoin, okay.
Julian Klymochko: NFT.
Chad Pruden: Okay, so this is a good question. I’ll give you like, again, a boring answer. I should probably pick some kind of name, but I read the book 100 Bagger.
Julian Klymochko: Yep.
Chad Pruden: Have you read a 100 bagger?
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, I have.
Chad Pruden: 100 Bagger, I just love this book. I love this philosophy. So, it’s more not what I would buy. I would tell you where to hold it and never look at it and have this coffee can approach. So, you know, you look at companies like Netflix that have been a 100 Bagger and we all want this 100 Bagger real quick when it’s over time, you know, Netflix on its way to a 100 Bagger, had days where it was down multiple days, down 20% in a single day. And the problem with investing is you get picked at all the time, right? You constantly get picked at, you know, what you’re worth. So, I won’t give you an individual name, so boring, I know, but I would tell you to find good companies that you believe in and hold them, set them in the coffee can, and don’t look at them, incredibly, incredibly hard to do. But that would be my advice of an asset to own. I think it needs to be stocks. And then I would mix in a little bit of a one [Inaudible 00:32:17], just a little bit of a plug there.
Julian Klymochko: Nice, Todd, what’s your call?
Todd Degelman: You know, for sure, I was to pick one area, I guess I’d be in the tech space, it’d be something on the NASDAQ exchange. But quite truly, you know, I always preach to clients and brokers, you know, what do you know? What do you really know? And buy what you know, and I know this business. And so, you know, I’m biased, but I’ll be long Wellington-Altus shares all day long. And I get a chance to be a part of something great. I know the business and you get a lot more comfortable when know what you’re doing in that field. And I always laugh at the farmer that comes in and really analyzes risk in his portfolio. And I said, hey, you put $3 million into dirt, and hope it comes up and you talk to me about risks. It’s just different, you’re totally comfortable with that. That scares the crap out of me. So, it’s relative to each individual person, so for me, that’s it.
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense in terms of understanding the risk and be able to bear it. Some people say, well, if you’re held at Amazon since the IPO, you know what I made a thousand times your money, but who would have actually hung on through the 95% drawdown, that it’s gone through.
Todd Degelman: And then that’s what I say to advisors when I’m on the road, it’s like, okay, what do you know best? You’re giving people investment advice for a living, you know your business, you know this company, you know the banks make money. Why not own your own company? Why not own shares in yourself? And like-minded people like yourself, and that should be the draw to consider a home like Wellington-Altus.
Julian Klymochko: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, say, you know, a high-net-worth individual is looking for an investment advisor. Where can they find out more about you guys?
Chad Pruden: Well, obviously Todd Talks with Chat. Always on our website, Degelman Pruden Group, you know, go on there, all our contact information on there. You can attach our emails to the podcast. We never really got into that part, but I think that’s a very interesting space in the market right now, is the high-net-worth space, is like what do you do when you have enough? Right? What avenue do you go? Do you lock it down and safety? Or do you go bigger? And to me, this is an investing podcast, but you know, taxation will be the big thing. I think it’s not what you make. It’s what you keep.
Julian Klymochko: Right.
Chad Pruden: And my big passion is taxation is like, you know, they’re going to probably come for the top 1%. And so, what do you do? What strategies are being implemented? And it’s crazy, but like, we’ll sit down with a guy who has, you know, $20 million and his investment advisor and his accountant have never met, never spoke, don’t know, right. And so that’s a been, a big thing, I think to Todd and I success is, you know, creating this virtual family office of where a client comes in and, you know, we are the Amazon, we have everything, one stop shop. Everyone actually talks to somebody. And so, in a world of lost form of communication, I think it’s of the utmost importance, especially as the network starts to creep up, so.
Julian Klymochko: That makes a lot of sense. So, Todd and Chad, like to thank you for coming on the podcast today and to our listeners. One thing that I’m coming away with is a quote, care more than your competition. And that’s a meaningful to basically any business. It’s always competitive to kind of differentiate yourself, work harder and just care more. And I think that’s a great insight that our listeners can carry on. So, if you guys are interested, check out the website, we’ll post your email and contact information as well. So, thanks gents for coming on the show.
Todd Degelman: Thanks for having us.
Chad Pruden: Thanks Julian, Thanks Michael, it’s awesome, guys. Really appreciate the opportunity.
Julian Klymochko: Alright, thanks so much. Bye everybody.
Chad Pruden: Take care.
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.
