Podcasting from Future Proof Festival

The team at Advisor Circle partnered with Ritholtz Wealth Management for a new style of conference—in the spirit of a beach festival rather than settling for presentations in dreary hotel rooms. This finance festival had several risks, like no backup plans for bad weather.

But Future Proof 2022 was a remarkable success, packed with excellent content and an environment that led to better enjoyment and networking opportunities.

I was lucky to host my podcast, Behind the Markets, live from the Social Experiment podcasting stage, and we hosted an excellent guest.

Joining me on stage was Brian Spinelli, the CIO of Halbert Hargrove, a west coast RIA with a national footprint. Topics we discussed included:

• How Spinelli’s team is reflecting on current market opportunities, and how Halbert Hargrove manages risk dynamically, particularly in tough markets like we face today.

• Low expected returns for a standard 60/40 portfolio has the Halbert Hargrove investment team wanting more equity exposure, but through a trend-following technique to adaptively allocate in order to help manage higher stock market risk with mitigated drawdowns.

• The Halbert Hargrove team embraces alternative fixed income strategies, and we talked about both private real estate investments and reinsurance strategies, as well as a search for even further alternative income strategies that solve the key income challenges clients have.

• To create room in portfolios for alternatives, Spinelli’s team incorporates a capital efficient core family that leverages stocks with bond futures to help replace traditional Treasury duration they had in portfolios. While stocks and bonds are declining in 2022 thus far, Spinelli believes in the diversification this approach provides in markets even more difficult than those we have experienced in 2022.

• Halbert Hargrove started incorporating crypto assets into their client portfolios—most notably with a separate account structure to facilitate direct bitcoin and ether exposure. Whereas crypto assets often appeal to the younger generation, Spinelli’s team found it was some of the older clients who had allocated to crypto with their solution, perhaps because the younger clients already found solutions on their own.

• To kick off the podcast, Professor Siegel shared his latest views on policy misdirection from the Fed and how they are over-tightening financial conditions and likely to cause a more severe recession than necessary. If you missed his virtual  appearance on CNBC last Friday, this discussion was a preview of his remarks there.

And if you were on the fence about attending the Future Proof Festival next year, I encourage you to give it a try. Live podcasts were only part of the appeal. It was an all-around great experience. Hope to see you there and you can listen to our full discussion with Brian below.