Prepare for Market Shocks: Smarter Investment Strategies

Prepare for Market Shocks: Smarter Investment Strategies

[Brad Barrie]

One of the analogies I use is it’s the bus that you don’t see that hits you, right? So if you see a bus coming, you usually get out of the way, right? Most recently, we’ve had these tariff gyrations.

But we just thought it was, you know, we didn’t think it was a big bus. We thought it was going to be a much smaller, maybe one of those smart cars, right? Or a bumper car.

And it wasn’t going to be anything major. And then it was major. And then that was a huge bus that came and hit us.

[Michael Gayed]

So how should investors think about, and financial advisors, think about diversification beyond just sort of the idea of feeling better because there’s more securities in a portfolio?

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, diversification is not more stuff, right? It’s not just different, you know, more stocks, more funds. And, you know, look, I’ve got 10 different names in my portfolio.

I must be diversified. It’s not. So the other old saying out there on diversification is diversification means always having to say you’re sorry, right?

So if there’s not something in your portfolio that you’re not happy with, then your portfolio is really not diversified.

[Michael Gayed]

My name is Michael Guy, a publisher of the Lead Lag Report. This Lead Lag Live conversation is sponsored by Dynamic Wealth. We’ll be talking about Bradbury’s firm as well as the offerings he’s got.

But Brad, let’s refresh everybody’s memory as far as your background, what you’ve done throughout your career, your experience and what you do here on.

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, thanks, Michael. Yeah, it does seem like it’s been years since we’ve done one of these. Time tends to fly very rapidly, especially in these uncertain world that we live in, even though it’s always uncertain.

So my background, I was a financial advisor for about 20 years, started at the end of 1990s. And I had a financial planning practice in Chicago area. I transitioned that to my partners, began consulting financial advisors on various topics.

Basically, your investors, your listeners, can kind of think about it as they may go to a financial advisor when they need help. Where does a financial advisor go when they need help? They come to somebody like myself.

So with my experience and knowledge and focus, I help advisors on a number of different topics. A lot of that last few years had pivoted towards portfolio management guidance. And Brad, what do you know about portfolios?

60-40 isn’t working as well as it used to be and kind of pivoted our firm to focus more on CIO work. And sometimes the industry calls it an OCIO, an outsourced chief investment officer. We like to think of it more as a partnering chief investment officer with financial advisors.

We partner with firms. We don’t replace their team members. We hopefully make everybody that much better and build customized model portfolios for financial advisors that follow our multidimensional asset allocation theme, which I’m happy to touch on.

And a number of years ago, a few years ago now, we launched a mutual fund, the Dynamic Alpha Macro Fund, as simple as DYMIX, which we’ll talk about today, that combines equities with the global macro future strategy. So that’s just a little bit about me. I can probably go on and on for hours.

I’m also very charitably inclined. I run a nonprofit here in the Las Vegas area called the Alliance Foundation, sat on a number of nonprofit boards. And definitely a big believer in giving back to our communities that we all work and live in.

I believe if we all just do a little bit, you know, adds up to a lot. So that’s me.

[Michael Gayed]

I’ve talked to a lot of financial advisors. Some of them are more intellectually curious than others when it comes to markets, as you know. Over the years, I used to be on the road and presented CFA chapters, and I came to the conclusion that a lot of financial advisors, even if they have the CFA designation, are really kind of, I’d argue, more hyped up retail, meaning they will fall prey to the same behavioral biases that retail investors and traders typically do.

Am I off on the idea that a large portion of the financial advisor community, they don’t really understand markets the way that maybe they portrayed themselves to be understanding of markets?

[Brad Barrie]

I think, yeah, I think when you think about a financial advisor, their job is to advise clients on all aspects of a client’s financial life, right? Investments is just one component of that.

• There’s cash flow management.
• There’s income tax planning.
• There’s estate planning. There’s insurance planning.
• There’s retirement planning,
• College planning

You know, a good financial advisor, I believe, looks at the holistic approach and partners with folks like myself on investments, partners with good estate planning attorneys, good tax preparers and advisors to act as that, you know, sometimes as an overused analogy. The financial quarterback for their client, right?

And connect industry experts, financial experts to understand the real client’s goals. That’s what a good financial advisor does, is understand their client’s goals, their risk tolerances, what they want to achieve, and then helps point them in that correct direction, right?

Look, we all love to follow the market. And, you know, we talk about uncertain times that we live in, and I alluded that all times are uncertain. Even when it seems like we’re in certainty, we’re not. There’s always unexpected things around the corner, and we can’t expect them. That’s why they’re unexpected, right?

One of the analogies I use, and I’m a big believer in using analogies with investors. And if you are an investor, I think it’s good to put things in terms that you understand, that you can relate to.

Because if you understand it, if your investors understand it, your clients understand it, then comfort level is higher. And folks are more likely to stick with the plan, whether that’s a financial plan, an investment plan, an investment, it doesn’t matter. If comfort level and understanding is there, being able to stick with it long term is the key, right?

So one of the analogies I use is it’s the bus that you don’t see that hits you, right? So if you see a bus coming, you usually get out of the way, right? Most recently, we’ve had these tariff gyrations.

And did we see the tariffs out there? We did. We saw them out there.

We just thought it was, you know, we didn’t think it was a big bus. We thought it was going to be a much smaller, maybe one of those smart cars, right? Or a bumper car.

It wasn’t going to be anything major. And then it was major. And then that was a huge bus that came and hit us.

And then a week later, not even a week later, another vehicle kind of hit us, but it wasn’t a bus. It was an ice cream truck, right? It was the friendly neighborhood ice cream truck that kind of came.

And that was Trump saying, oh, 90 day pause. And that’s when we saw the markets go up by 9%, right? We saw a huge drop and we saw, you know, huge gain.

And I’ve heard some industry experts talk about the probability and the statistics and how many standard deviations those types of swings are. And the numbers, I’m not going to quote them because I don’t remember, but they were astronomical. Like once every million years or something, do we see returns like that?

And again, don’t quote me on that. But those are unexpected things. And that’s why not letting your emotions dictate your actions, I think is a core lesson, right?

And kind of keeping those analogies in the back of your head maybe helps you put that into perspective. You know, my thoughts.

[Michael Gayed]

Nomadic advisors can be emotional too. I mean, it’s supposed to be hand-holding their emotional clients, but, you know, emotion has a funny way of transferring over from person to person.

[Brad Barrie]

Well, it’s we’re all human. We’re all human. At the end of the day, you know, until those robots take all of our jobs, right?

And we’re like the humans in WALL-E, you know, and it’s a great movie. If you haven’t seen it, you know, you got to watch that. And, you know, the humans there are just kind of all floating around and everything’s done for them.

We’re all human. We’re all driven by emotions. And in the investment world, fear and greed are two big emotions.

And, you know, we all have them.

[Michael Gayed]

So tell me how some of those advisors maybe in the midst of this tariff volatility, which, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it was a short period of time, maybe coming back to it. Were you getting calls from advisors on the OCIO side? What were the conversations like?

Talk me through that period a little bit.

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, so we’re very proactive. So when that really started to happen, nobody knew how long it was going to happen for, right? You know, it was a very quick blip in retrospect, but who knew, right?

So we were very proactive. We put out a video on YouTube and LinkedIn to kind of help investors and advisors put things in perspective. We reached out to our advisory teams we work with with that type of information and some thoughts and perspective.

But the most important thing during those buses that hit us is to focus on the facts, focus on logic, try not to let your emotions drive you. And again, we work with amazing advisors and they all get it, right? Our advisors were not panicking.

It was more of, you know, what are the best topics to reach out to our clients? Is now the right time to reach out to clients? And it is, and it’s not to reach out to clients to scare them or make changes.

It’s to reassure them that, especially the clients we work with, reassure them that their portfolios are positioned. Now, by definition, the bus that hits you is something you can’t predict, right? So we’re big believers in preparation over prediction with overall portfolios that are built for investors.

Because you can’t, you can’t predict, but you can prepare. And our message is be prepared for a range of outcomes. Yes, I mean, Michael, this was a, it was a fast blip down, a 9% rise one day.

And, you know, we’re, I think, back to those levels pre the liberation day, I believe this is called, with the tariffs. Now, that rain, that outcome, certainly people were predicting that and there was a lot of people predicting even worse. You know, the people that predicted it would be a fast bounce back.

They were right this time. Will they always be right? No.

So if, you know, I’ve heard the word hope often, right? We hope these tariffs are just negotiating. We hope this is all just positioning.

We hope that this isn’t going to push us into a recession. And I’ve heard people on the television, experts use that term. And look, I certainly hope that’s the case as well.

But what if it’s not? And if it’s not, and your portfolio is mission critical, mission critical to support your retirement plan for your kid’s college, be there for you when you need it. Hope and optimism shouldn’t be your only plan, right?

So having parts of the portfolio that are positioned to do well in periods like that, and we did. We had a number of positions in our portfolios, our fund included, that did well during that time. And, you know, many of which have continued to do well and did well in past as well.

So having multiple drivers of return that don’t rely on strong economic growth is by definition diversification.

And yeah, so our advisors were, I’ll say prepared for the uncertainty as we always need to be prepared for the uncertainty and communicated, I don’t say positive messages, but reassuring messages because that’s what investors need during really all times. Even when the market is doing fantastic, that’s when reassurance and proper portfolio management is even more important to lock in those profits when they happen and not take on too much risk and not keep just the magnificent seven.

[Michael Gayed]

Let’s talk about diversifying hope. How does one properly do that? Because let’s face it, I think it’s arguable that most things are just variations of beta in terms of an opportunity set, right?

It’s, you know, even if you look at long, short portfolios, for example, they often just track the consumer staple sector ETF, just because it’s a lower beta, right? With the net long exposure, but still beta. So how should investors think about and financial advisors?

Think about diversification beyond just sort of the idea of feeling better because there’s more securities in a portfolio.

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, diversification is not more stuff, right? It’s not just different, you know, more stocks, more funds. And, you know, look, I’ve got 10 different names in my portfolio.

I must be diversified. It’s not.

So our approach, we call it multidimensional asset allocation.

It focuses on not just diversifying with asset classes, but diversifying with strategies, different strategies and different approaches, right? You know, you may have many different types of stocks or even private equity, but what do they all require? They all require strong economic growth by and large.

If we don’t have strong economic growth, then all of those equities, if there’s a macro hit, are, you know, are most likely all gonna suffer to some degree. So having, you know, and even long short strategies, you mentioned, Michael, are, there’s many different types of long short strategies and different types of tactical strategies. Some use quant, some use fundamental, some use technical analysis.

There’s different arbitrage strategies out there that may form more like a bond in the longterm, but don’t have any interest rate risk or any default risk. They have whatever their arbitrage, be it convertible ARB or merger ARB or otherwise, are relying on. So, you know, Harry Markowitz, you know, the father of modern portfolio theory, asset allocation, diversification, whatever you wanna call it, talked about having different risks in a portfolio.

And many folks tend to, again, misunderstand and think that he talked about having multiple assets in an asset allocation, but that’s not really what it is. It’s having multiple types of risk in a portfolio, which sounds odd at first that we’re gonna add risk to a portfolio, but when you add one risk, you’re taking away another risk. So in the traditional 60-40 portfolio stocks and bonds, you have really two main levels, two main drivers of return, stocks and bonds.

And the year like 2022 or years like others in the past when both underperform or go down, you had two diversifiers. We think, and this is why we call our approach multi-dimensional, we think you should have multiple types of drivers of return. So if you have just a buy and hold stock portfolio, that’s one driver of return.

Buy and hold bond portfolio is another driver of return. Having a tactical manager that is gonna be able to move between stocks and bonds, overweight stocks, underweight stocks, move to bonds, different types of bonds, that risk is not necessarily stock risk or bond risk. That risk is that manager’s successful in their ability to move between those different categories.

And there are a number of managers that are successful in that. And that takes away the buy and hold risk and transfers in the tactical risk. And that’s our view on asset allocation.

It’s a view I’ve had and I’ve used with clients for well over 20 years when I was in private practice. And it works. And even if you take a step back and you think, what is the main purpose of diversification?

From a practical standpoint, and again, this is, I don’t know if CFAs are taught this and from the academic standpoint, but from a practical standpoint, as someone who has built portfolios for individuals that have been retired and relied on those portfolios to live on, and I got calls like, hey, the car broke down, we need 15, 20, $30,000 out of the blue, what do we take from? Part of the goal of diversification is to always have something in the portfolio to draw upon for when that bus hits you, for when that unexpected occurrence happens, right? And the refrigerator blows up, the car breaks down, the kids need money, what have you.

And if everything in your portfolio is down or not doing well, and you have to take something that is down and you sell it, you’re signing that loss. And you’ll never recoup it after you sell it from a loss by definition. So the other old saying out there on diversification is diversification means always having to say you’re sorry.

So if there’s not something in your portfolio that you’re not happy with, then your portfolio is really not diversified. It sounds silly, but the other way I say it, and I would say this to my clients, and many times they would finish my saying, and I would say, if everything in your portfolio is going up at the same time, it usually means everything in your portfolio will go down at the same time, right? And having that, it’s really a different philosophy and a different perspective on what diversification really should be, right?

It’s not just having 15 different investments and funds and a bunch of different stocks. It’s identifying different drivers of return that, you know, beat by a different drop. And, you know, maybe they all go up at the same time, but in certain times and other times they won’t.

And identifying those drivers is kind of a key part of the diversification.

[Michael Gayed]

Let’s talk about your fund for a bit here, your mutual fund, D-Y-M-I-X. Sharing the screen here, but yeah, let’s go through it.

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, so D-Y-M-I-X, Dimix, as we call it, is our mutual fund. Let me share the fact sheet, first of all. So from a high level, our mutual fund, it’s been around almost two years now.

It combines a global macro futures strategy along with U.S. equities. Now, U.S. equities are balanced between growth stocks, dividend-focused stocks, and kind of a broad market, think S&P 500 type stocks. This is kind of the buy and hold equity position.

And then within the global macro futures position, we can go long or short various commodity futures markets. So, which, you know, again, from a high level, they’re all listed below. Our performance has been, this was as of March, our performance has been very strong on really all aspects relative to the S&P and the S&P target risk balanced index is a 60-40 mix.

Statistics As Of March 31, 2025

We’re very proud of those numbers. In addition, we’re proud of the risk and our non-correlation. So if you look at the column here, where you see my mouse, our standard deviation is just slightly higher than the S&P.

But one of the things I like to really emphasize is our standard deviation is not risk. So standard deviation is deviation. So, if you think about that, and I’m not sure how to use a laser on this, I apologize.

Otherwise I would point, I don’t know if I highlight, I can highlight a little bit, I guess. So standard deviation, kind of think of it between gain and loss, right? And most investors want to deviate on the gain side, right?

You know, if you’re deviating and you’re looking different and you’re making more on the gain side, that’s what you want. You don’t want to deviate on the loss side as much, right? And have greater deviation on the downside.

So we’re very proud that our gain deviation is more of the contributor to the overall standard deviation than the loss deviation. And that’s why our Sharpe ratio and our Sortino ratio are as high as they are. From a very simplistic standpoint, Sharpe and Sortino, you can kind of think of it as return divided by risk.

Sharpe uses standard deviation as risk, which we know we’re not a huge fan of as a measure of risk. And then Sortino uses downside deviation as its measure of risk. Basically, the higher the number, the better with Sharpe and Sortino.

Correlation to the overall market is 0.28. So we’re very non-correlated to the overall market. And then upside and downside capture ratios. It’s also another one of those statistics that most financial advisors should be familiar with.

Investors think of it this way, is the market is going to capture 100%. So the S&P is going to capture 100% of its return on the upside. And it’s going to capture 100% of its return on the downside, right?

The 60-40 portfolio was about 67 up, 73 down since our inception period. We captured almost 70% of the upside of the S&P 500 with only about 28% of the downside of the S&P 500. And that’s because of our kind of overall non-correlated approach.

This slide here I’ll show you, we’d like to compare how we’ve done relative to major asset classes. So again, this is since our inception timeframe as of the end of March of this year. Again, a return, very strong correlation to the market.

Alpha is a measure of risk-adjusted return. Again, higher the alpha, the better. Beta is a measure of risk.

The lower the number, the better. And again, Sortino is one of our more favorite. But you compare us to different types of stocks, obviously bonds.

And sometimes we get confused for managed futures strategies, which I wanna touch on a little bit. Just for compliance standpoint, I’m gonna show the rest of these slides to keep compliance happy. So all those slides are shown.

So again, our fund invests in global macro futures. And equities. Sometimes again, investors will hear futures and they’ll say, oh, you’re a managed futures fund or you’re half a managed futures fund.

And technically, we invest in futures and those futures are managed. But most managed futures funds tend to be more of a trend following approach. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons that we launched this mutual fund is because I didn’t know of another mutual fund or ETF that existed out there that is a discretionary, fundamental global macro strategy.

Again, I was a financial advisor for nearly 20 years, happily consulting with healthy financial advisors, be even better financial advisors. I never sought out to launch a mutual fund and be a mutual fund portfolio manager. But it’s such a great strategy.

Our global macro manager has done an amazing job running this strategy that it made sense to make it available to financial advisors and average investors, which is why we launched it. But getting back, trend following managed futures follows a trend. And I don’t have the data to look up, but financial advisors, investors can look up their favorite managed futures ETF or mutual fund and look at their performance year to date or over the last year.

And they probably won’t be exceptionally happy with the returns, right? So the trend following index, which is the SD trend index, since our inception is down 2.81%, right? Why?

Well, what’s the trend been like? The trend has kind of been like an EKG machine, right? It’s again, the tariffs.

It’s tariffs across the board, 170% tariffs, market plummets on 90 day pause. Markets are back up, 9% in one day. So if you don’t have a trend, riding that trend wave can be a challenge, right?

Now we like trend follow. In our models that we build, our multidimensional models for financial advisors, we incorporate trend, be it through ETFs or mutual funds, but our fund complements those. Sometimes I’ll use the phrase, non-correlation is not binary, right?

It doesn’t mean, binary is one in zeros, right? You either have it or don’t have it. Well, I’ve got diversification.

I have one alternative. You know, I use trend. I use, you know, long short.

Well, maybe that is non-correlated, but that’s one. That’s binary. You have one.

What about multiple? And again, this is why we’re multidimensional. If I showed you we’re non-correlated to the S&P at 0.28, we’re also non-correlated to trend. Again, it doesn’t show on this screen. If advisors would like to see those numbers, please contact me. I’m happy to send you the analysis on our long-term correlation relative to other trend, managed futures strategies, you know, other alternatives.

We’re non-correlated to them as well as equities versus most other managed futures funds are non-correlated to equities and bonds, but correlated to each other, right? So, yeah, we help during these unexpected periods and yeah, we’re very, very proud of that. The one thing I forgot to mention, which, you know, is silly of me not to mention it is we were the number one fund in Morningstar’s macro trading category for 2024.

So even a great year for stocks like 2024 where the market was up over 20%, we were up, I wanna say also close to 20% in 2024 because of our, you know, innovative strategy, combining equities with the global macro futures and taking kind of a different approach towards it.

[Michael Gayed]

Anything that you can share in terms of how the macro positioning may have altered, changed? I mean, I know you can only disclose to some extent some of the holding shifts, but anything that looks different in terms of that side of the portfolio compared to the prior year?

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, so look, in our global macro future side of the portfolio, and we try to be as transparent as we can, right? So right on our website, which is dynamicalphafunds.com or dynamicwg.com as it says right next to my name, we publish monthly updates on our mutual fund on what’s contributed, what’s detracted. What’s changed in the portfolio month to month and what our current positions are.

And we touch on why we’re positioned in that. And this is one of the beauties of being a more of a discretionary fundamental strategy is we have logical reasons. It’s not because the quant model triggered and X, Y, Z happened and the black box told us to do it.

Again, nothing wrong with those strategies. We’re just different. And I think sometimes we’re easier to understand and if understanding is there, it’s easier to stick with our strategy.

So look, we went into this year with more of a bearish lean on the equities because of valuations, because of fundamental reasons for being bearish. And that has contributed to some of our performance this year.

Positions can be changed at any given time. However, so even if we’re wrong on that slight bearish tilt, we’re always 50% long stocks and part of the mutual fund, right? And we can take off the short position when and if it’s appropriate.

But we have other positions. We’re currently short coffee and we’re short coffee because of an increase in supply from harvests in parts of Brazil. And because of favorable weather patterns.

Again, there’s fundamental reasons for prices of certain commodities to move. So we don’t rely on just one theme. We’ll have three to six different themes in the portfolio at any given time, in the futures portfolio at any given time and be actively managing that.

And risk management is a key part of that. You know, we will not always be correct. Nobody will, right?

But by managing the risks for when we’re wrong and cutting those losses short and letting our winners run, that’s how money is made in the long run. And that’s how we’ve done it. So I would encourage investors and advisors to check out our website, read our monthly updates.

And, you know, reach out to us. Again, we’d like to make them very readable, which sounds silly to say, but, you know, we’ve all read plenty of white paper that when you have insomnia, it helps put you to sleep. We try to make ours more enjoyable, informative and understandable for everybody.

So, but being that active and tactical and, you know, is a core component.

[Michael Gayed]

Somebody on YouTube who came in late, is this a growth fund or an income fund? We should think about that. Everyone likes to think of things in terms of categories, boxes, right?

So alternative, sure, but alternative in what direction?

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, so we target appreciation, right? So I’m not going to say growth because I don’t want to get confused with growth over value. But we target appreciation.

We target total return. You know, the beauty behind our strategy is we are half equities, half US equities, half global macro futures targeting total positive absolute return. And because the futures give us efficiency, we don’t need 50% of the portfolio to get 50% exposure to the global macro future strategy that we invest in, which means we have excess cash that is really sitting in T-bills.

So sometimes we’ll talk about it as we’re 50% equities, 50% global macro future strategy, and maybe 30 to 35%, maybe more in T-bills, earning T-bill interest, right? Which has been very favorable to us.

But we’re not, we don’t target a dividend. We, you know, there could very well be distributions at the end of the year because it’s a mutual fund that certainly reinvest, but I wouldn’t call it an income fund per se, even though it could generate some income for investors.

[Michael Gayed]

I was thinking about things in terms of diversify to each other. So alternatives to alternatives, how does it stack up against other non-correlated types of strategies or asset classes you’ve seen?

[Brad Barrie]

Great question, yeah. And I love that term alternatives to alternatives because we don’t think, you know, you should just have one alternative, right? So again, this is, it goes into why we decided to launch this mutual fund because we are non-correlated.

We are a diversifier to stocks, to bonds, to real estate, to manage futures trend following investments, to arbitrage strategies, to buffered investments, which are very popular, you know, we’re non-correlated historically to all of those. And the reason is, and I like to, again, identify that there’s a causation for that non-correlation, right? If you can’t identify the cause for something, in the back of my head, I would always wonder is it happenstance, right?

Is it just, I just happened to be non-correlated this time, but when that bus hits us, are we gonna be correlated, right? They always say, what’s the phrase? Correlations move to one during times of stress or crashes, right?

And that’s what you saw in 2022, right? When stocks and bonds all went down and you’ve seen it in other times in the past, but if there’s a causation, again, think of our coffee trade. If there’s an increase in supply of coffee because the harvest is gonna be bigger because the weather pattern is favorable, then, and if demand doesn’t change, think back to basic economics, supply and demand curves.

If supply goes up and demand stays the same, prices fall down and vice versa. So that’s an identifiable, logical reason, right? And that thesis would turn out to be false, right?

There’s no guarantees and that’s why we have multiple types of positions in the portfolio at any given time, but that thesis will hold whether there’s global pandemic, whether there’s other variables that may impact, if stock equity valuations are too high and the market is priced to perfection, who cares? People are still gonna drink their coffee and if there’s an oversupply, prices go down, the thesis holds true. Same thing with other theses that we have in the portfolio or we would have in the portfolio.

Another one that we really like long-term is copper. Now we don’t currently hold, as a bend of a monthly reporting, any copper positions. We’ve owned it in the past, but long-term, our thesis on copper is global growth in China and other parts of the world are increasing the demand for electricity.

You think of electric vehicles in this country and in China and in others, you think of artificial intelligence. It’s kind of amazing how much electricity is required to run all these AI chips, right? Even the new ones that are potentially more energy efficient, all that means is they’re gonna pop even more of them into the computers to be even more powerful.

I saw a statistic actually, I think ChatGPT gave me this statistic that said there’s gonna be over the next 10 years, they need to build 10 nuclear power plants every year just to meet the requirement of artificial intelligence. This is worldwide. 10 nuclear power plants every year to provide the electricity needed for artificial intelligence.

So that’s 100 in the next 10 years. Obviously in the United States, we’ve not been building them and China has been building a lot of nuclear power plants. And again, the name of our fund is the Dynamic Alpha Macro Fund, which means dynamic, we’re flexible. Alpha, we’re shooting for alpha positive, you know, better than market returns and macro, big picture, right? We’re not picking a winner and saying this nuclear company is gonna do better than this one or this EV company is gonna do better than this EV company. It’s just a macro thing, you know?

Who cares which one wins, they’re all gonna need copper. So, you know, in the future, we could very well have, you know, a long position in copper, we don’t currently because of a number of reasons, we do use technical analysis to look at price trends and price, you know, valuation of it. So we’re not just gonna haphazardly buy it because, you know, you gotta buy it at the right price.

But to me, that’s how I think of alternatives is identifying what is the driver of the return for that alternative. Don’t just say, oh, real estate’s an alternative, you know, because it’s labeled as an alternative and nothing wrong with real estate investing, but last time I checked, people do need jobs in order to pay the rent and buy houses. And for house prices to go up, people need to have jobs.

So normally for a strong real estate market, you have to have strong economic growth. So if we don’t, then could the real estate market be impacted? Most likely, right?

So identifying what is that driver of return for us is a key component of understanding alternatives and alternatives to alternatives and just building a truly diversified portfolio, right? You know, if you only have stocks and bonds, I would argue you’re not diversified, right? If you follow a 60-40 approach, you know, and we like 60-40.

60-40 is part of our multidimensional model, right? But it’s not the model, right? Our multidimensional model, you can think of it as having multiple models in one.

Having a 60-40, having a quant tactical, having a fundamental global, having, you know, arbitrage, long short strategies in one cohesive model.

[Michael Gayed]

Yeah, no, I think that’s very well explained. For those, Brian, who wanna learn more about the fund or maybe wanna reach out to you to learn more, how should people go about that?

[Brad Barrie]

Yeah, so dynamicwg.com is our main website. It’s easy one to remember. You can also go to dynamicalphafunds.com.

I am very active on LinkedIn. I try to post a video every week on LinkedIn, a short five-minute video on market thoughts, financial planning thoughts, various things like that. You can certainly email us.

You can email me directly at brad@dynamicwg.com. If you’re a financial advisor, happy to provide information on our multidimensional models, on our mutual fund if you’re an investor. Also happy to address any questions on what we do.

And if you wanna be put in contact with a good financial advisor, qualified financial advisor, let us know. It’s not our business, but we work with some amazing advisors just like you, Michael. You work with some amazing advisors and yeah.

[Michael Gayed]

I appreciate those that watch this live. Hopefully, I’ll see you all on the next episode. Be a fan of alternatives.

We could be in a more difficult cycle going forward. So thank you, Brad. I appreciate it.

[Brad Barrie]

Thanks, Michael.

[Michael Gayed]

Cheers, buddy.

We Are Here To Help

We hope you found these, these insights helpful.

If you are a financial advisor and would like more information on our multi-dimensional approach towards asset management, you can download our white paper titled Busting Seven Risk and Return Myths by visiting our website at DynamicWG.com, or email us at info@DynamicWG.com. If you are an individual investor, we are happy to address any questions you may have and put you in touch with a qualified advisor, if so desired.

Until next time, take care, everyone, and make smart, logical, and fact-based financial decisions.