Money & Wealth w/ Alexander Roepers

interpret that however you like. This is a guy that I just met and I was impressed with him so much on an initial meeting, probably the only time I've ever done an interview with anybody where literally on just meeting them versus having a long term relationship, I said, you have got to get on tape like you. The world needs to hear. And it was a very improbable meeting. Well, let me tell you who he is first. Alexander Rupers and he will correct me if I'm not pronouncing his

name precisely correct. Is a founder and chief investment officer of one of the most important investment companies in America. He is on Wall Street and a running Atlantic investment management which has a global impact but based in New York City. He has forty two years of experience in investment, thirty six years its founder and CEO CIO Chief Investment Officer CIO is more important than CEO in his space chief executive officer versus chief investment officer at Atlantic, which

he founded in nineteen eighty eight. He was private previously with a couple other corporations and investment houses. Masters of Business Administration Harvard Business School in nineteen eighty four, a Bachelor of Business Administration at the Netherlands School of Business in nineteen eighty It's fluent Dutch, German, French and finance. It is the fluency in finance that we want to

talk about today. I am honored to welcome someone that I'm going to call a new friend onto this podcast platform so he can educate you and how we make smart sexy. Alex, you're a pretty cool guy. I know because I read people very well and it's one of my few gifts. And do you remember the conversation that we had in the Hamptons that stumped me?

But I really loved our conversation, not just because you're normal and being in the world of finance and high finance, some people are just arrogant, they're obnoxious, they're self absorbed, they're in a different world because I think they're uncomfortable in their own skin. That's a whole different podcast on spirituality we're not going to do today. But somehow you became reasonably comfortable in your own skin. Maybe we'll talk about that as it relates to sort of unpacking your background.

But you and I had two separate conversations. One was briefly at your house and another one was at a neighbor of yours home, and you laid some philosophy about the world down to me, do you remember that conversation.

household level of simplicity. People forget that when they buy a car, or dishwasher or a home, they do a ton of research. Actually I do too. I would you buy a dishwasher for eighty thousand dollars when you can

buy it for four dollars? This is I'm saying this crazy number because when people buy stocks, they don't do the homework, and they just fine because somebody told them it's a good idea because it's going up, and they hurt some key phrase like artificial intelligence, and therefore they should be involved and they should just buy it, and they just fail to do any analysis. But yet we

all are value investors. When you're buying a car a dishwasher, you have a sense of what it should cost, and if you don't, you go on you know, on the website, you go to a dealer or a retailer and you figure out what do things go for it, take a look at them. In the end, you compare to the shop. You be educated, and you can get educated in one minute or ten minutes or an hour, depending on how

much time you want to spend on it. And then you make a decision if you need one of these things based on the quality of the product and the product you get it. This is the same way you should have approach selecting stocks. If this is what you want to do with some of your money. If you want to be in the stock market, you can do it through an ETF, which is an exchange traded fund.

Simple way of saying, this is a daily, actively traded vehicle that can capture the index or a sector that you're interested in, so you don't have to stock pick. He just kind of get broad exposure through the ETF. Or if you want to pick an individual stock, then you need to roll up your sleeves a little bit and take a look at you know, what is the

value and do a little more analysis. But that might be too much time and beyond the reach of a lot of people and the interest So then an ETF kind of makes sense to get broad exposure to the market.

But I do recalls talking about this area where you kind of bring it down to, you know, get basically educated and do your homework when you buy stuff you need for the home, for your life, and then once you have some savings, it certainly behooves you to put it in inequities in my view, because if you have a long term view, the return on equities has been between eight and ten percent on the indexes over a long period of time with volatility, but that far exceeds

the return you've been able to get cash or on fixed income investments.

explain what an intex mean. I mean, we shouldn't assume there's no home economics class anymore, Alex in school, there are people who are highly sophisticated advanced degrees PhDs, masters degrees, white and black Latino women higher high who have not a clue what we're talking about here because no one taught them, and they fake it. They they don't admit

that they don't understand how money works. A quarter of those who make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year a living Patieck to paycheck, half of those making one hundred thousand dollars a year a living Pagett to paycheck. Of course, seventy percent of America is living Patchett to paycheck. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to come back to our conversation because what you just said just underscores that you're a decent human being. You're concerned about

the least of these gods children. You understand that even though you know we were in the Hampton's where you know it is a very privilege. We'd all admit that's the very privileged environment. If you own a home there, you even blessed with the American dream and the fact that you can live in that world. She'll understand another world and have compassion for it and empathy for it. Says a lot about you and your character and who you are. That's the reason that you're on my podcast

is I think you're a great, a cool guy. It's not a smart one, but is what you said to me when we talked. You explained to me in mathematical, numerical, statistical terms, your business philosophy, your investment in philosophy. Do you remember that conversation.

out of the air. My hope was to come to the United States, which I managed to do by applying to an MBA program. Applied to a variety of them, because lucky to get into a really good one. But I came across I remember one way flight on the cheap airline fin Air, with two thousand bucks in my pocket, ended up in Bingham to New York on snowy January fifth and nineteen eighty one and went to the car dealership and bought an Oldshmeel Starfire nineteen seventy six. Was

my pride and joy and that gave me wheels. And I had a job which paide you know, uh okay, but just paid the bills for the cheap apartment. And that's how I got started with a nice job with the company that was an industrial machinery maker that helped automate, you know, the manufacturing of what made computers and TV

stick you printed circuit boards. So anyway, a nice couple of years there, went on to business school and from there I was lucky to find an employee in New York in the field that I wanted, which is in finance, and learned a bunch of things during the first four years in that job that made me come up with an idea to start Atlantic at a pretty early h I was twenty eight at the time. Wow had a good salary in those years after business school, but you know,

nothing outrageous. Certainly didn't have any start capital for my business, didn't any investment capital from either family or friends. All I had was experienced six years at this point, two

years before business school, four years after. I learned a few things about analyzing investments and companies in those years and decide to take that toolbox, if you will, or the lessons I learned formulate specific specific investment strategy which we still do to this day, which is a bottom up, you know, value analysis kind of what I described earlier with your dishwasher in your car analysis. I don't know any other way to getting comfortable with an investment other

than sticking to a known area. You know, I don't go into areas you don't understand. In my case, all of technology, I don't understand it. I mean, I like to use technology products like we all do. But to invest in a company that sells technology, whether it's software, chips or high tech products, I'm uncomfortable with it because I don't know how it will change and how that

will affect the business. So I want to invest in companies that are very analyzable and understandable, that make products that we all use and that we see and can touch and have been around for a long time. And then you pick companies that are leaders in those areas, and then you wait until they're cheap enough, and so I decided to pick a strategy that is very comfortable for me in terms of competence and experience I've had,

and also to avoid risk areas. You not to go into areas like biotech and high tech, which for your audience, there's a lot of money to be made in these areas. I'm just personally uncomfortable with it, and I think if you invest in these areas, you have to take that into account, and quite often it's better to go with very large companies that we all know, like Apple and Microsoft,

which are very very big names within the universe. But back to the approach that I started with, it was basically middle sized industrial products and service companies where we could gain an edge by doing our investigation, our study, our review of these companies, meeting with managements, and then put together a selection of ten or fifteen names that we liked for our clients. So that's how Atlantic started

with that idea. And the idea was that through our stock picking and our focus, we could outperform i e. Do better than the index. We need to because if we don't, we have no right to exist. You can simply buy, my clients can buy. Of course, the index back to the exchange trade fund that anybody who's listening to this call, if you have some savings, you can buy an ETF, which is a way to participate in the US stock.

And that investment house, without getting too much into your business, is now several hundred million dollars under management, correct, correct? So you really built yourself literally up from nothing to become an American success story. Let's just say again, without getting in his business, he is a half a billion dollars under management in a company that he controls, no

complicated management structure. He's the chief investment officer and he's been running it since he was twenty eight years old. I get that right, correct? All right? And it's a very simple business plan. Simpleness is that you're very focused. So, as I understand your investment philosophy, you've been known as your concentrated approach, your value driven investment approach. Talk a little bit about how you developed this strategy and how it's evolved over the years. And at some point during

this interview. You're going to go start as we say in music, You're gonna start rapping, riffing, and you're going to naturally go into that thing. Say the thing you told me when I mention that blew me away, which was literally just a mathematical, statistical outline of how you go about really a science in investing that I thought was brilliant. But what is your approach and how does you develop and how's it evolved over time?

I don't go for very small companies. But I also want access to management in order to talk to them about the business and to give suggestions where it makes sense. And so we focus in the two billion at the

minimum to twenty billion dollar sized companies. These are very large numbers, of course, but within the public equity market it's considered smaller, mid gap large gap is much larger companies, as you know, Apple, Microsoft are north of three trillion dollar market value, so we don't deal with these companies

at all. Also, we like to focus on companies where we have an understanding of the business and where the risk factors of the business are reduced, and so we avoid, as I mentioned before, high tech and biotech because of the risk of what they're called difficult work technological obsolescence risk, meaning that new products can come out that make the old products obsolete. We've seen so many technology changes, including everybody in the audience, I'm sure we'll be very familiar

with with all the technological advancements we're all enjoying. Well, those things have tremendous impact on the profitability of a technology product that is being replaced or being made obsolete by the next invention. So we stay away from high tech and biotech for those reasons. That's just us. Many other people love to invest in those areas, not Atlantic, and then we stay away from areas where we find

transparency to be an issue. And with all due respect to banks, there are many many great banks out there you can invest in, but we stay away from them because we find that the transparency of a bank is difficult to assess, and so we don't invest in the area. So now you have an idea of these areas. So two to twenty billion dollars in size, enough liquidity, ability to access management with meetings, and stay away from certain risk areas. And within that, we want companies with good

balance sheets. A balance sheet is at home. You have your your assets, you have some cash, you have some things you bought, you have a house hopefully, and then you have a mortgage that's a liability. So you look at the balance sheet. Companies have the same if you will, with cash and property and receivables and nayables, et cetera. And so we want good balance sheets. You can evaluate that. It doesn't take a degree to figure out what's a

good and a bad balance sheet. It's a quick lance at what's publicly available to see if a company has affordable amount of debt, not too much debt. And so we make sure that our companies have good balance sheets and that they've always been profitable. One way to make sure of that is you look at a ten year history of a company. Again, all of this is easily available online, and you can see if they ever lost money.

A simple idea is, you know, if you take a company that builds ships or does coal mining, or is a pure chemical commodity company, they are very cyclical. Cyclical means that if the economy goes down, their revenues go down a lot, then they'll probably lose money. And so we really are avoiding deep cyclical companies because we don't want the company that ever loses money, even during a financial crash like O eight or during the COVID disaster

off the beginning of twenty twenty. And so we look for solid, profitable companies in a familiar area that we can analyze or a size that we can get our hands around it and meet with management to do further due diligence. And then we want to wait, very much like patient folks looking for a certain target, we wait until the share price falls down. In our lap, we're basically tracking a whole bunch of companies. It's not that many. I mean, it's obviously in our field. With our business.

We have computer models, we have screens. Don't expect anybody to do that. You can be much more focused than we are. Even but then you look for companies that you track for a while that you watch the share price and what they say, and you look for them to fall in your lap, meaning they come to a price level, valuation level that is very very attractive, that

is typically the bottom where they trade. And now we're talking about valuation multiples, and I don't want to get too far into it, but ideally we buy something at ten times earnings, Okay, net earnings, that's a good guide for our kind of entry level purchase for a company. Ten times net earnings or one times revenues is about the area in which we are interested.

to see through to the other side. He doesn't like Wall Street, doesn't like fall, He doesn't like a lot of noise. They want to be able to be quiet and elegant and simple and you can see through it. You want glasses that are all fogged up. You know, it's not good to drive on a foggy day, not fast, So you want to slow it down so you have clear view, uh transparency to what you're looking at. And he talks about this stuff. By the way, this is all He's been very basic. He's breaking this stuff down.

But they talk about this stuff in such a language on Wall Streets. People that are there, people are intimidated to read the Wall Street Journal, for God's sakes, because it's all these uh terms that no one unpacks. So I wanted to slow down for a minute now. He mentioned, he ain't even things to fall in his lap. And I'm not gonna mention this company's name. Although you can

listeners can probably figure this out. But today a company that I believe is a good company, he's not a company he would track us too big market cap wise. They had a health situation that I think is episodic. In other words, it was something that dealt with the public and they had an episode, a little bit of an outbreak, and the stock price dipped as a result

of that. My sense was this was not the company's fault, that this was just something could have happened to any company, And my sense was it was going to happen once and it was done, one and done. It was just one of these unfortunate situations the delivery truck or whatever or something, and the stock dived. I bought it, so that fell in my lap. It's not the company. There's nothing wrong with the company. The company didn't do anything wrong.

It's otherwise a great company, great brand. But I was able to get a fifteen percent discount. I believe it was because I bought it today, and that stock at some point will recover because the cash flows, the profits, the brand, the company itself was very strong. So I wanted to just sort of give people a bit of summary wrap of what some of what you just what you just said. And the one thing I think people must find fascinating, Alex, is that you say you talk

to management. Now, when people listen listening to this, are the average American or average citizen wherever they're watching this in the world. They're thinking about going to the manager at the retail store or the grocery store, and they're hard. They can't get by the retail clerk they're trying to They're trying to get to the manager or a supervisor. They have a conversation that person is blocking them. We're

talking to when you're talking about management. They might find it fascinating it here that you literally pick up the phone and called the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, maybe a board member or two of the whole enterprise, and you're able to get these people on the phone because they want your investment dollars. Is that right? Uh?

to your unpacking of that work. Due diligence is everybody on this podcast is doing due diligence, just a fancy wall set work for doing your homework, you know, checking things out. You all do that, looking at your purchase of anything you're doing. You check things out, compare prices on the shelf. So whatever you're doing, that's due diligence, going to the store, kicking the tires. But anyway, we get these conversations because we're in in business for a

long time, we're respectful. We go first through the investor relation side, and once we are in a position to make this a large investment for us, we will request for a meeting, first a call, then a meeting with the CFO, and yes we meet with CEOs as well. But again you don't We don't want to do that unless we are a sizeable investor potentially, and also that's one of the reasons we don't want to go above a certain size, which is in our case, twenty billion.

I'm not going to call it. Tim Cook from Apple. I have no chance to ever get a meeting with him, frankly, because it's a huge company and we're never going to be any size investor in Apple. So we want to stay with these companies where we have a chance to meet with top management. For a normal retail investor, for anybody in the podcast, you're not going to get these conversations here with a CEO or a CFO of a

public company, But you don't need to. You can do a lot of your homework, a lot of hug due diligence by yourself with your friends. Maybe you make a little investment group and educate yourself and bring in occasionally a podcast like this, or a friend or who is in the business to have a chat to have an hour long conversation about stocks or the investment world in general,

and so suggest. But you can do a lot on your own looking online, typing in the name of a company or incident or the one that you mentioned, which a lot of people will know if you would mention it. I guess we're not getting into it. That's a perfect example. We all know this company, it's a great company, and

something unfortunate happened. They'll iron it out, and I'm very convinced that this particular air pocket you want to call that you know where the stock falls like this will be corrected over time if it is indeed a one off situation, which I think you're right in your assessment. But that's the kind of thing where everybody in this podcast can pick a number of companies where they are customers in their daily life, where they know the company,

they're inst in the company. Maybe it's five or ten that you track a little bit, and you'll find, like yesterday, like wow, if this is one of them, look at that fifteen percent discount, Just like somebody on the corner saying, is this watcher you've been looking at for a year, suddenly we're having a off sale. Do you rush over? You buy it? Right? Same with stocks, no difference.

and we set a date, well, I've got conviction. And yes, I may not get to the maybe something might have happened. Two percent of the time you don't get to uh through the ceremony because something I don't know, something weird happens.

about this. But I'm sure you would agree with it. If you want to have some fun with your kids at Christmas, about two months to two months before Christmas, go and try and find buy one share of stock and get one get one of these these uh, these companies that give you certificates and they'll they'll frame them for you and send it to your companies to do that. They don't. These companies don't don't don't do physicals share certificates anymore, most of them. But you can get a

company to send you a certificate. I have one and put it on the wall. Give your kid a share stock for Christmas. Anyway. The point of that is once you own one share stock of any publicly traded company. When you talk about public equities, he mean publicly traded company. When you have one share of stock, you have the rights to all their financials. Hello, So you get to you get to look at into the under their hood of any company that's publicly traded with only one share

of stock. Now, uh, the investor relations if you want to. I shouldn't tell you this, but because not only by writing letters to boards and members and the board directors you get upset with some company, you have a real serious issue. Now much about suing them. You just want them to know that there they could do better. And you can't find the board of directors anywhere. You can't find the management level either. It's a big retail company.

Just go down on the website to investor relations. His investor is something right when you go there and you open that up. My god, it's like opening the hood of a Ferrari. Right, everything's in there, including the board and their most recent financial report. So I just wanted to he'll so he goes and deals with the investor relations departments out of respect, and he only goes one step further if he's got conviction. Did I get that right, Alex.

doing your homework. And it's just time and effort. And depending on how big the decision or how big the purchase is, if it's something material, the more you need to roll up your sleeves you have a T shirt on. You just leave it the way it is. But you get busy and you talk to people, and you walk around blocks and you go to stores and or you in the case of a personal situation, you talk to

more people. You talk spend more time together, you talk to their friends, meet the family, et cetera, et cetera, all the obviousself.

a good, pretty good retail investment. And by the way, anybody listening to this, if you have a four one K plan an investment account, if you work for somebody and they're matching your four one K, get as much of that as you can because that's free money, right as as as jay as jay Z would say, I'm gonna give you a main dollars worth of worth of worth of advice or nine ninety nine. This is no ninety nine because you're not paying a dime for it. But if your employer is matching your four in one K,

that is free money. Now before we get on to I'm gonna run through the other questions pretty quickly because I because I want to make sure you have a chance to answer each one of them. But on this investment philosophy, which I think is so important, do you have a numerical statistical numeric? Is there a model that you use for your investment? Something you wanted to share?

eighty you know, boom. So you don't have to watch the news all the time. You just look at your computer. And I said, look at this, it's like motting a fishing line out and a little bellow went off. I think there's a hook there. Let's start, you know, yanking on that line and see what's on the other end of it. So that's that's it. So you do the alerts are important, and then once we are alerted to the situation, we will roll up our sleeves the good

old homework and due diligence we talked about. And yes, we have financial models. So now we have taken and downloaded all the financials that you can get from the company website, from the financials in it, you know, Excel spreadsheets and out get sophisticated. We do modeling. We look on we make estimates as to where the business is

likely to go. These estimates are determined based on our conversations with the management, with other people that know the company, with competitors, and then we come up with predictions and based on the predictions and based on where the share price is. We have very set discipline as to what valuation level we're willing to buy. This. Back to the example used earlier, Let's make it a restaurant. They can

relate to a restaurant. Let's say in the neighborhood, a restaurant that you know around the corner becomes available for sale. Let's say they do a million dollars in revenues a year and they make one hundred thousand dollars in profit, and they say it's available, and you know, maybe you don't have the money, but maybe a group of you are inserted in buying into it because it's such a great place. You all go there anyway, and maybe you can run it better. And he said, okay, how much

does the seller, the restaurant owner want for this. Let's say he says twenty million dollars. He said, you've got to be out of your mind. That's twenty times revenues. That is two hundred times earnings. It's crazy to go away.

higher level. So if somebody's coming to you and they want to sell you a business or invest in a business, he just gave you a formula and he told you what's ridiculous and what's crazy when it falls outside of that box. He told you, no more than ten times net is a net income or net. I want to share you it is your.

Five million dollars is a joke. The funny thing is in the stock market, people are buying things that are based on what their friends told them at a barbecue or what they've heard on TV as something great about technology or artificial intelligence, and they just buy it. I mean to put it in perspective, the greatest company everybody talks about these days is Navidio, which makes the plumbing for AI. You know the chips that already needs that, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google,

These guys need it for their AI artificial intelligence. So in the videos, trading at three and a half trillion dollars, which is about twenty five times revenues. Now that's ridiculously expensive. I wouldn't touch it. But of course it's done very well, and it continues to go up because more and more people want to buy it, and they do perform very very well. But it is extremely expensive and nothing can go wrong in terms of the growth slowing down or

anything else. So that is to me speculative. And yet it's one of the largest market caps in the world if in fact, it's number two right now buying Apple. And so I challenge, or I ask everybody, do your homework when it comes to stock market investing, as well as you do your homework when you buy a house, a car, or a dishwasher, or if you're offered an opportunity to invest in a nail salon or a restaurant

around the corner. Compare it the purchase pride or whatever they're asking or whatever the stock is, trading it against the total revenues and against the earnings that they have and then assess if this makes any sense to you.

investment and opportunity for the next five years. And it's not twenty of them, there's not one hundred of them. It's not a restaurant around the corner. It's not a nail saloon around the corner. There's there's there's not even an attorney. There's hundreds of attorneys, thousands, hundreds of thousands of attorneys, law firms. It's one of these, so you can decide whether you want to invest in it or not.

But that's why there's a lot of hype around this particular investment, which is why he calls it speculative, which is correct. Bitcoin could be the bitcoin, sorry, cryptocurrency could be the same kind of conversation. You can get lucky with a bitcoin, but you might get unlucky with the thousands of other cryptocurrencies which are completely speculative. So just again, it comes back to do your homework. You know, I've about Alex being this very successful guy, and he's got

this beautiful home I was in. He doesn't spend time in most of those rooms of his house, as I don't either. We spend time a lot of time in one room, our office, and it's it's late in the day in Manhattan. He's in his office. He's not at I don't know what your perception as a successful people look at that desk behind them. But those who are watching this on video, after you listen to it on the audio, and if you listen to an audio, go

and watch this clip also in video. Behind his desk is nothing but papers, documents, stacks of analysis and best I can tell, there's a highlight marks on the different reports. If I'm seeing this properly, and there's a pen that's yours. There's a newspaper, there's a Wall Street Journal. You're looking at the market for today. There's a remote for the TV. You're looking at CNBC or some are Bloomberg or whatever

to see what's going on in the markets. In other words, this guy's not relying on other people and sit around Struggan cocktails, whatever your perception is of highly successful people. This guy is hustling and he's working. I have that right, Alex, Are you working today?

bonkers these days a little bit. But what do you what's your view on the current economic environment, and what's your advice for aspiring investors on on opportunities if you want to call it that broadly defined for the future.

you will. But also I came here for opportunity. Many people do the same thing, and so we're all lucky to be in a country where you can educate yourself, you can work yourself up, even if you have modest means or very little means, you can. Really there's a place everywhere for a job, for learning and for advancing yourself. The Keith thing is be disciplined, be focused, try to avoid taking on debts where you can first pay down debt as much as you can, and then try to

save and always try to put somebody away. When you get going and things are going well, always say, but the sooner the better. The younger you are, the better. And if you work hard and you get the controllable variables right, So what is a controllable variable. You can't control you know what the weather will be like, you can't control what all the others will do. What you can control is what you can do. You can be on time, you can be reliable, you can be trustworthy,

you can be hard working. These are the things you can control. Always control them. Don't mess up, don't you know? Be reliable ninety percent of the time. Be reliable hundred percent of the time. The example I use is when somebody comes for an interview in a nice white shirt and there's a pizza staying right here. It will be where the eye of the potential employer will go. Even though nine your shirt is perfectly white, there's a pizza staying and kind of wonder the employer wonders, like, why

didn't you remove that? And why don't you change your shirt before you got there, same with the typo in your resume. These are controllable variables. You need to get that stuff right, spend the extra time to review stuff, to be on time. And once you have a job, you know, be on time, be reliable, work hard, do the right thing, and be patient. You know, it takes three years to get three years of experience. It's that's

very obvious. But people, particularly in this generation, think they want it all right now, and it takes a while. You know, if you look at my business started at twenty eight. The first three years I didn't do very well at all. I had to borrow money for my brother after three years in business to pay the rent. He charged me ten percent.

You know, if you if you stay with something that makes sense, whether it's a job or a new business that you're trying, if you know it makes sense and you know you didn't get the breaks you wanted or the tailwind that you're looking for, stay with it, you know, keep at it. I mean, I'm certainly an example of that where you know, ten years into it, finally things started to go my way, and even then you got to watch it. So stay paranoids, meaning have the fear

of failure as an entrepreneur. Always have the fear of failure that will keep you from falling into the complacency trap. Never get complacent unless you step out of the game. Then step out. And if you've achieved everything you wanted and you want to just play golf or sit on a bench or go for walks, that's fine too. But then you can be complacent. But if you're alive, meaning like we're live on this podcast, if you're alive in a business or in a career, never get complacent. Always

have the fear of failure. Be one hundred percent reliable, one hundred percent on time, and these are the controllable variables. Then you can still have set backs, but you can also put yourself with that in a position to suddenly reap the benefits of your experience, your patience to make some real good progress and money when the tide turns your way.

doing things. Good habits is having a set of standards about things that are consistent and do that consistently over time, which is another way of what he just said. My wife Shascher, would say that most behavior is learned behavior. So you want to be nosy about everything, but certainly the right things. When Alex and I met, one thing was obviously about both of us. We not talked about any of this, by the way, beforehand, we were both nosy I mean, God gave you two ears in one mouth.

If you listen twice as much as you talk. I was nosy about his business in his life. He was nosy about my business's life. He was so nosy about inclusive economics, inclusive capitalism. We hosted the meeting in his house. That's how nosy he was. And he didn't hold them, host the meeting and leave. He holds the meeting a set in the audience with a notepad to take notes,

because he wanted to learn. Who knows whether he's going to end up investing in a business that that may be tied to an underserved neighborhood or community, their huge market opportunity. But he, whatever his reason was, he was just passionate about education. Something else that wants you to notice again, I'm not gonna get any of his business about net words, none of your business either. Let me say let me just say this. My man has done

very well for himself. He's very comfortable. Now. If he walked down the street, you would never notice he's got a We didn't. We didn't talk about this. We can talk about our wardrobe. My guess is how he dresses every day. He's got a powder blue shirt maybe light gray, light blue. He's got it buttoned up to the second button. Uh, he probably has no fancy jewelry on, no watch or anything. I'm sure he doesn't have any fancy rings that stuff. I want me to see your hands, Alex, I just

I'm just curious. Let me see.

on stupid stuff. So it's a very simple mestha. So you don't so the creative class that's listening to this, you get paid for being loud. It's jewelry it's sunglasses at night? Is you know broach?

one thing they're buying. Your brilliance, your intellect, your good habits, the things he just mentioned. He wants to folks he wants to So you're going to be focused on his clients advancement period. It's very simple, good habits executed over time. Alex, Did I get in that wrong?

and CE ensure it like a bank would be. A bank is the only basically government backed business in America, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal government. You don't care which bank you put the money in is guarantee. When he what he's done is much more much difficult, much more difficult because he had to get private capital to invest in an investment house on theoretically

is at risk. And so what he's done is he's got to be very very precise and very very clear on the numerical the numbers of the KPIs key performance indicators, because he's gonna be judge on everything. He can't afford a moment of mistake. So it's really create what he's built. As you're looking, Alex at the future twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six, people here listen. They have become more comfortable,

They feel like they know you a little bit. What advice do you have for them about are there any we're the last term we're gonna unpack to day. Is is it a is it a bullish environment? Or a bearish environment. Can you please explain what that means? And if you believe it's an environment that's opportunistic, meaning there's opportunity in all the chaos. Are there two or three or four categories areas industries that you encourage people to

look at. And then I have one last question for you before we wrap.

the next couple of years again with great optimism. Why we have fortunately very low unemployment overall. Of course, there are pockets where it's difficult as always, but in general it's a pretty good environment. We have interest rates which were high recently, but they're coming down as well, so that's positive. We've had a lot of uncertainties and we continue them some, but I think they will go and become less uncertain as time goes on. You know, for instance,

the US presidential election, we'll have certainty on that. Soon, we'll have geopolitical issues that might bother people that are and all of us that will suddenly be less of an issue. These things do resolve themselves over time, So I'm looking optimistic to twenty twenty five and twenty six particular areas of interest. Of course, there's a tremendous amount of excitement in the technology area, but again, buyer beware, beware of what you pay for certain stocks in these areas.

In general, I think there's going to be an upturn in housing and automotive from very low levels we've seen because of the higher interest rates and mortgages. Mortgage rates decline in existing home sales. People don't want to move from one home to the next. And therefore, if you don't move from one home to the next because you have a low mortgage rate, that was locked in and

you don't want to make the move. So right now, existing home sales are as low as they were in the crash of two thousand and eight two thousand and nine, they pick up. You see a pickup in applying sales in paint and carpets and all the things that people do when they get a new house. They renovate it, they freshen it up, they make it look like their house. And so existing home sales are at the bottom. They're likely to move up as interest rates come down in

the coming year. So those are areas of interest, if I may.

all these basic things. You can just in the words, get simple educational information that you can discuss at the dinner table with everybody. With yourself, with your spouse, with your loved one, with your young kids. Talk about balance sheets. What is an asset, what's a liability, what's depth? What is a mortgage? How do we save money? How do we grow money? Give, if possible your kids when they're twelve, thirteen,

fourteen years old and an account. I'm not saying any particular, but e trade accounts, some account where you can buy stocks, and then for Christmas or birthdays, or for whatever holiday you celebrate, give another one hundred dollars or two hundred dollars or whatever you can give to this account instead of another toy, and let them pick their own stocks, or let's discuss those stocks together. I've done it with

my kids. And at one point, you know, if you start at twelve or thirteen, maybe at age twenty five, twenty six, it could be a meaningful amount. And then you have your job as a young person. But you also have your savings account. You shouldn't touch that and keep growing it. And as you said, you're four to one K, which you might get from the company if they match it. Maximize it for sure, and then make sure it's invested properly. And if you have choices, try

to put it into equities. I think those are good points.

probably got security. Whatever I never run in, I'll never be in the Hamptons. I just would love to spend thirty minutes with a guy like him and ask him questions and be inspired and may and maybe even pitch him for an internship for me or my son or daughter or whatever. But I love to just have thirty minutes with this guy. I'm making a commitment for him

that hopefully he won't hate me for. But if you write me a note, write it to Senate Bill dot Fair, Bill dot Fai R at Operation NOPE dot Org, my deputy chief of staff, and make a case for why you should have an audience with Alex and his firm. Why you think that you are worth thirty minutes or forty five minutes of his time? The top ten people,

but the letters I get. I'll give nine of them a copy of my book Financial Literacy for all just to write in the letter at the top ten and the number one best one I'm gonna recommend to Alex he actually meets with you for thirty to forty five minutes and give you, you know, just give you an audience, one on one, and hopefully that might inspire you to change the course of your life. Alex, would you mind doing that.

the fourth one. If you're around three really nuts, good people that are slacking off and hanging out, you're probably going to be the fourth one. So pick your friends carefully. You can't pick your family. And if you don't have the values from home, try to get it from somewhere else. Get it from people that inspire you. Read books about people that were very successful. There's so many out there

where people who write memoirs or write about them. And read how these folks started and how they got somewhere, and you'll learn that most all of them recommended or did the things that we were talking about today about the values and the variables you can control.

bookends of our lives. Watching you hang around, watch what you do, watch your your habits. What these are your controllable variables, some of them. And as Michael Milk and our mutual friend who introduced us would say, that we are all born with even our equal potential and equal intelligent intelligence. For that potential, for that intelligence if you grow it, but not equal opportunity. Thank you Alex for being a beacon and a lighthouse for equal opportunity.

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