Q1 2026 Bond Market Update

Too wealth isn't just what you earn. It's the life you live and the legacy you leave. Welcome to Money Sense, where we've spent over 30 years helping people plan for their finances, their health, and the story they want to tell. (upbeat music) Welcome to Money Sense. This is Jamie Williams, wealth advisor with Ellen Becker and Bestment Group. Today, I'm joined by a friend of Ellen Becker, Dick Schiller. Thanks for joining me, Dick. Thanks, Jamie. Thanks for having me. So Dick, you've been working with us now for several years and also your, you have another member of your team that I'll let you share a little bit about that, if you like. But do you want to, do you care to share just a little bit about what your strategy outlook is for what you do and how you help us? Certainly. Yeah, so Pavlik Investment Advisors has been partnering with Ellen Becker Investment Group for going on 10 years now. The relationship actually started in 2016 with my now retired partner, Terry Pavlik and Karen Ellen Becker. And it's been going strong for 10 years to the day. Yes, like you mentioned, Terry Pavlik retired at the end of 2025 and really almost simultaneously Pavlik Investment Advisors acquired our office suite mates. We had two other investment managers who were sharing office space with us. So the best thing about it is I brought another CFA to the staff. So it's myself and Bill Warnke, two CFA's that are closely monitoring all, Dixtingecome bond positions for Ellen Becker. So that is really where our focus is, it's that direct bond holdings of fixed income securities. That's excellent. Congratulations on everything happening. That transition sounds really positive for you. Thank you. It's been a busy start to the year, but all in a good way. Excellent. So today we're going to dive in a little bit. We got quite a bit. We're going to talk about-- we're going to talk about, obviously, the fixed income space. But Dick, I also know that you are a student of the markets overall and have a great deal of knowledge just across all classes, if you will, different investment types and themes. Also, we want to talk about a little bit of what's happened in the markets over the last, say, a couple of years. And as we move into 2026. And then we're going to talk a little bit about quality, too, and what it means to be invested in a manner that's consistent with your objectives and how you should be thinking about that. Before we jump in, just share a couple of high level items. You know, fascinating, the S&P 500 hit 37 all-time record highs last year in 2025. The year prior coming off of 2024, the 7. So in the last two years, we've experienced something close to almost 100. All-time highs in the S&P projections were that we would finish somewhere around 6600 in the S&P last year, and we almost crested at 7,000. So really just a solid market. We're going to dig in a little bit as to what drove that. And then in April of last year, I think that had our attention because we saw the second fastest bear market in history. Third, a worse drawdown since the global financial crisis and in October of 1990. So pretty amazing that we finished the year the way we did. Also, I want to maybe have you weigh in on this, but international is something that we did not expect to see over or outperform international and emerging markets finishing in the mid 30%. So with that, let's kind of jump in, Dick, the Dow, 19, all-time record highs. What are your general thoughts right now about last year and then kind of where we sit today? Yeah, definitely. Like you described, Jim, I mean, if you were just to-- I like using the phrase one in doubt, zoom out, and you close your eyes. And you mentioned some of those statistics that you mentioned, basically, 100 all-time highs in the last two years. That's pretty astonishing. And I don't think was on-- how many people's bingo cart definitely wasn't on mine. I mean, I feel like we have just totally climbed a wall of worry. And that's not totally uncommon. Generally, when there's no worry out there, when everything's just rosy, everyone thinks everything's going to go to the moon, that's technically when we generally have some problems out there in the market. So that wall of worry, I'd say, is still there today, maybe a little bit less so. The tariff issues seem to reside a little bit. And economically, things are still relatively soft, which is an interesting dynamic when you compare that to the stock market statistics. We've stocks have just been up into the right, but we are starting to see unemployment take up a little bit into that mid-forze range. Job growth has been pretty slow. Inflation has come down, but it's still well above the Fed's 2% target. So there's never a dull moment out there, but especially now, it's an incredibly interesting time. Because I'm not jealous of the new Fed chair coming in. I'm not the envious drone power leader. That's the tough job. Very, very tough job. I don't know what I would do in their shoes, because they have a balancing act to follow here. But that's what I think is most interesting is there's a little bit of a dichotomy between the main street economy and the stock market. They're showing two different things. Let's talk about that for a second. So we've got the current interest rate environment. Rates are sitting at between 3 1/2 and 375. We've come down. I think we had what, two or three rate cuts last year? Yes. And there's a lot of uncertainty as to, obviously, with Powell now his term is up, and they've named his successor. So if rate cuts are going to occur, what were your thoughts on when that would transpire? Yeah. Well, I believe Powell's term ends in May. And I think any movement before that would just get a ton of scrutiny. So my guess is, unless something really jarring happens, if it's just kind of status quo, like what we've been seeing, he's probably going to stay still until the summer, until after May, and not push through any more rate cuts. The position is appointed by the administration. So there's no doubt that Trump has a hand in this and his staff. I also think that, although the Fed has to be independent, I think it's no surprise if you read between the lines that the person he's putting in there will likely favor more rate cuts to come. So-- And it's a tough spot because rate cuts stokes the economy. So we give gasoline to the fire, if you will. And it sparks inflation. And the inflation is not where the Fed really wants it to be. We've come a far way down from 9% where it was in 2022, down to 3. But 3 is also not 2%. Not the target. It's not the target. And some people say, well, move the target. And I don't know if I'm on board with that. I think it would help a lot of Main Street in America to have interest rates. So there's so many factors, right? Totally, to have some lower interest rates. So I still expect two rate cuts. So like you said, that brings that Fed funds right from 3.5 down to 3. How does that impact you, our listeners, that directly impacts the rate of return on the money market fund? On Schwab right now, that valued vantage is around 3.5. I'd expect that to be 3.0% by the end of the year. We talk about that often in the sense that those are the types of risks that we're looking at. We're trying to diversify away from risk, reinvestment rate risk, interest rate risk. Those are two very prevalent things. I don't think people really understand if they put money into a bank CD or some sort of fixed income instrument. And they hold it for a period of time, say, six months or a year. And then, of course, they go to the bank or they look at the rates and say, where are we at? They're not as happy about that, right? Because they're trying to mitigate some of those lower returns. With that being the case, I do want to weigh in on what your thoughts are on high quality, corporate investment grade bonds. And what the yield to maturities are looking like right now. And if maybe you just want to start by explaining, what is a bond? And then we could talk about where that puts rates now versus where we were before the great inflation. It's funny you mentioned that on CDs. Because just in the last few months, we've had a few clients come to us with CDs maturing. And they're generally the clients that have done this for 20, 30 years. They go back to their generally smaller local bank because they pay a little higher than the chases of the world. And they say, what used to be a four is now a 3% and they used to offer me 13 months and now they're offering me six months. The time duration has shortened up. And if you ask, well, why is that? I think the common assumption is that rates are going lower. So the bank doesn't want to make a loan for lock-in, a loan for three years. They want to say, we'll give you your money back in six months. And that's that reinvestment rate risk that you were talking about. So the client's question is, hey, I'm a little irritated with that low rate and shorter duration on time. What else can I be doing? And that's where that investment grade bond portfolio and a ladder can really come into to help one-- I mean, get your higher returns and two lock them in higher for longer. So let's put some numbers behind that. On the shortest end of the yield curve looking out a year, we've been actively buying bonds for clients at about 4.0%. Is it that much higher than the money market fund? 3.5 to 4. It's 50 basis points higher. Is it that much higher than CDs? I think it definitely is. And then also, just think the CD issue-- you have to go get another $10.99. You have to physically interact with your banker. You have to do some legwork and get tax forms and be rolling those CDs. When you have that all in-house with Ellen Becker, having your advisor look over it, that's all done for you. So I think there's a little bit of a client may have to let go of the reins a little bit, but then realize, oh wow, that's what I have these advisors for. And they can boost return and access of what the CD rate is. If you look out going further down the maturity yield curve, it's a pretty positively sloped, which is a good sign, a normal shaped yield curve ranging from 4 on the short end. And if we go out 10 years and creating our traditional 10-year ladder, we've been able to get about 5.5% with some triple BBA2 with Moody's. Really, what we view as a conservative risk return yield at about 5.5% in the out years. So from 4% on the low end to 5.5% on the going out 10 years. And again, that's you're buying that bond 10 years out. You're expecting to earn, you know, coupon payments of roughly 5.5% per year for the next 10 years. Right? And that's with compound interest. It's actually not 10 times 5.5. It's generally a little more than that. So that's where we see the yield curve today. Planning of vacation this year? Before you take off, make sure you understand whether travel insurance should be part of your plan. Join Ellen Becker Investment Group on March 12th from noon to 1.30pm for a live educational webinar with our insurance liaison Evan Brown. He'll walk you through the key types of travel insurance, what your policy actually covers, and why it matters, common exclusions, and how to evaluate costs before you buy. Learn more and register through the link in our show notes. Welcome back to Money Sense. This is our podcast today. I'm here with Dick Schiller. And with that before we took a quick break there, we were talking about the current yield of corporate investment grade bonds, which on a one year to 10 year basis, which we build 10 year ladders for our clients is as far out as 5.5%. That's fantastic. The 10 year US Treasury has been hovering in around somewhere around 4.2, I think. Is that, that hasn't moved really much. I don't think the hire for longer story, right? Correct. Yeah. And we've, we've messaged that hire for longer. We still continue to believe that's going to be the case. We had the jump. What really spurred this was the jump in inflation and interest rates moved alongside that back starting in 2022. And since then, you know, we've, like you mentioned, we've been in this range of between four and four and a half on the 10 year US Treasury. So you can go out by a 10 year T bill, right, and get 4.2%. And we're looking to earn a little bit more, right? So that 5.5% is directly comparable to the 4.2% and where we view, we're not taking on excessive risk. But to earn, you know, 4.2 versus 5.5, when you're looking at big dollars, it adds up. And it more than compensates for any advisor fees as well. And that's a mention the income we collect along the way for that, right? Because that's kind of the idea. So let's tie that in because when we talk about what a bond is, which is a fixed income instrument that you're essentially buying a small piece of a company's debt, or that could be a government or a municipality or things of that nature, we're really referring to primarily as corporates, right? And that if we're looking at a 60/40 portfolio, that would be the 40%. Let's talk about the other part of that, that portfolio, the 60%, which is a pretty common theme when you hear people talk about portfolio construction in the 60/40. By the way, last year, a typical 60/40 did north of 11% for the year, which was fantastic. But let's talk about the stock side of that, and we mentioned earlier the performance of the S&P. Do you have any initial thoughts on what primary factors drove the S&P performance last year? Yes, look in the last year, if you look at the market and total stock returns, we have a couple moving variables. We have one earnings growth, two, we have dividend yield, and then three, we have a change in a multiple paid for those cash flows. And what drove the majority of that return, if you want to look at the S&P 500, something in the upper double digits, closer to 17%. The majority was actually earnings growth, and where was that earnings growth? The earnings growth came from our really big tech companies, like in video, like Microsoft, like Apple, some of these really cash flow generating machines. I feel like we've been saying this maybe for over three years now, so about as long as we've been doing this podcast for, but they continue to be the stars. They're going coming into the year, they are more high expensive, high multiple stocks, and they remain that, but the earnings growth, if you grow earnings, let's just say 15% in video, obviously a lot higher than that, you're going to work your multiple down lower over time because your denominator, your earnings is going up. So it's really important to kind of look at a trailing PE ratio, and then maybe look at a forward because you're incorporating the future growth of that. So it was a great year for stocks. The main difference between stock investing and bond investing is we're not worried about that multiple expansion or contraction factor within fixed income. Our focus is one thing and one thing only, are we going to get paid back? You make a loan to an individual, to a corporation, you expect to collect interest and get paid back. We're not worried about the price being paid for that loan because our objective is to hold all bonds to maturity, and that's why we stay short to maturity. So that's a great balance portfolio where we can offer on the fixed income side, and five and a half on the long end, four on the short end, so a weighted average closer to 4.75. That's a pretty good return. I think most retirees, if they have a large enough nest egg, if they have other sources of income like social security, you can start building a portfolio of, you know what, I don't need to take all the risk of the roller coaster ride. Of the stock market to be able to create a decent return. Really our goal of the fixed income is to be the security. I don't want anyone to think we're going to make more money than the stock guys over time. We're just not, right? And we don't plan it. That's not the goal. But it won't work that way. Exactly. And stocks will be bonds over the long term, and bonds will be cash over the long term. The question is just, this works with your advisor for every single client, and it's a unique equation for every single client of where does that client fall within that risk tolerance spectrum. And we always kind of frame it with what is the prescribed allocation for a client's goals when you talk about getting returns that might be what I would consider to be really good today. And compared to when we were back in early 2020 before COVID, we were like 2% or 1.5% and now we're between 4 and 5, which is fantastic. But when we think about planning and quality, we always like to tie it back into what do you need? What do you need to meet the goal? What's our expected return? What's our required rate of returning to meet the goal? So it's nice to think about swinging for the fences and getting these great stock returns from the top 10 in the S&P, which are comprised primarily of tech. I want to talk about gold in a minute because that's kind of an interesting story, but nonetheless at 60/40 is where we go back to what Ellen Becker considers its 5 pillars of investment strategy. It's kind of our investment philosophy. Quality and diversification are two of those 5. Let me ask you this, when it comes to the S&P 500, there are 10 companies that concentrate the top 40%. What do you think, as a point in time today, is that healthy or do you have any concerns about that? Yeah, I definitely have some concerns about that. That said, I mentioned earlier in the podcast that those companies are driving the large proponents of earnings growth and cash flow. I think a lot of people look to make comparisons to the 0102 period, the tech bubble that burst. Yes, it's technology leading the market today, but it's also, I think if you go back and look at some of the companies that were really driving the market returns. First of all, the multiples were in the hundreds. We say Apple, Microsoft, expensive at 30, but it's not in the hundreds. Second of all, there were a lot of returns. Why those multiples were in the hundreds was because they weren't generating a lot of earnings. They weren't generating a lot of cash. The E factor was fairly low relative to the price paid. Those companies have dominated over the last three years. That's driven that high concentration. Generally, in an average year, we actually have three, five percent corrections or more per year. In an average, in a normal year, there's a 75 percent chance we have a 10 percent correction. More often than not, we're going to have a 10 percent correction. We've seen that historically going back even just in the most recent years. If my belief, when people look at the indices, the S&P, the Dow, the Russell, what's going to really drive, one, the Nasdaq and the S&P are going to be the performance of those tech companies. They just reported earnings too when they were strong. But the movement was the multiple. The price investors are willing to pay for those companies came down. Because earnings were going up, but the stock prices went down. So investors were paying less for that. I see that really as the biggest risk behind that, maybe something geopolitical occurring, maybe something in the oil or commodity markets occurring. But if there is a negative sentiment for AI and AI related names, there's going to be a decent amount of pain in an index like the S&P five. It's just comprises such a large amount. But with that being the case, Meg 7, we finally started talking a little bit about the AI story over the last few years, dominated investment headlines. Obviously, it's been a profound evolution of sorts in terms of an industry, an industrial revolution, I believe is what people are calling it. And I think everybody that I know, it's had some element or something that they've been using in their own lives. So with that, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I do want to ask you a little bit about some of the commodities and other things too. We have some exciting news. Ellen Becker investing group is officially launching our brand new program to wealth seed. This program is designed to give you high quality financial guidance tailored to your stage of saving, no matter your experience level. As part of this program, you'll get a growing library of short, easy to understand financial podcasts, monthly educational emails, interactive workshops, and curated tools like book and media recommendations. All created to help you build confidence and clarity around your finances. Clean it your wealth seed today and start growing with us at Ellen Becker dot com slash the wealth seed. This is Jamie Williams, wealth advisor with Ellen Becker investment group. And today I'm joined by Dick Schiller with Path of Investment Advisors. And Dick, before the break, we were talking about quite a few things concepts related to the stock market performance, concentration, earnings. But I did want to mention gold, you know, and silver. Let's the two are kind of together. Obviously we can go further into commodities, but those two I think have caught a lot of people's attention. I read this morning that gold was up 64% in 2025. And it got a lot of people's attention. So do you have any initial thoughts on that and just for the record, the commodities are a very specialized investment place for people to consider. And I certainly wouldn't call myself out as an expert in commodity trading or precious metals. But I will say that I really understand how people invest in physical gold and silver and it's kind of inefficient really. I mean, there's a lot of risks to that when you own it and you have to put it in a safe or hold it somewhere. There are instruments out there that people can purchase within, you know, the stock market they trade on exchanges. They're called exchange traded funds. But I think that's part of what might be driving a lot of this is the ease of access and an ability to own it. But I'm more concerned about upside, downside outlook. So any thoughts on that. Yeah, totally. It's been absolutely fascinating to watch. I mean, these are some big, big price movements, right? You mentioned 64%. It's only February today and the I feel like we've gone through 10 years of volatility in the gold and silver markets just in the first six weeks of the year. We are leading up to what was really a crash, a sell out. I think silver was down about 30% gold a little less than that. But even after that on that Friday, when the commodities just took an absolute beating, they were still up year to date. So really pretty miraculous that to start the year, some of these commodities were up 30, 40, 50%. They do retreat back that amount to still be up positive year to date is something to really make note of. You know, we talked a lot about balance 60, 40 diversification that type of volatility is is not something that we're like chasing. It reminds me a little bit of Bitcoin, right? And cryptocurrencies. And by the way, there we're in a 30, 40% drawdown from from all time highs. Does it hold a place in people's portfolios? Sure. I think if you have a client that's particularly more risk seeking and not risk averse just from a volatility perspective, right? There are a lot of opinions on on the metals on cryptocurrencies. And you know, I'm honestly still trying to figure them out just like I think we all are just like I think all investors are. If you just look at the market performance or they have been up and to the right, right? To be honest, I wish I bought 100 Bitcoin 10 years ago and forgot about it. But didn't didn't forget my password. That's like a nightmare. But anyway, the you know, the if you're willing to take the volatility of those markets, I think having a couple percent position in those areas is fine. And the question you have to ask yourself is if this goes, you know, as an 80% crash, you know, maybe doesn't go to zero, but as an 80% crash. Will you still be okay to will you be on track to meet your your long term goals? And you know, the if you look at the stock market, you know, great financial crisis was a 45 to 50% crash, you know, the worst crash since since the great depression. And you know, even there, right, that that's not a that's not a crash to shy away from right that's material people felt that in 07 to 09. But you know here in the crypto space and right now and gold, we're seeing some 30 to 50% crashes every year was a bubble somewhere. There is there is so it's fascinating. There's always a correction somewhere. There is as you get high highs that the volatility works both ways, right. So it's gone up to the extreme exponentially, if you will. And it's also comes down just just as fast. I would you know, the other thing I think a lot of people like to tie to maybe the gold silver to the printing presses of of the US government. You know, there was a lot of push from the current administration to be more efficient from government spending. You know, we doesn't get the headlines anymore. You know, doge was was pretty prevalent in 2025. But the reality is and we had talked about this when we had those election in person and webinars, which I thought were awesome to talk about a subject that's really a hot button subject that that's a little bit hard to talk about in our shoes. You know, our position was, you know, the doge might make a scratch, but it's not going to make a dent in the level of spend that the government as especially with with the big, beautiful bill. Ultimately, that's that's tax cuts at people will see coming back when they file their taxes really in these next couple months here. But that that spending and the debt levels haven't subsided right they've continued to go up and again that's not Republicans aren't great at it and neither are Democrats right so it's really a political agnostic comment but you know has that driven the rapid price of gold and silver. And I think it has a little bit I think if anything, you know, this is all all a sentiment play right so investors are seeing this and they're saying, you know, how do I how do I diversify away, you know, the dollar seems to be going down government spending is out of control. No one on either side of the political party wants to put an end to it so they say, well, I'm going to go by golden Bitcoin and I think that's really added to the volatility and in those two specific areas. Yeah, I also would mention that back in the late 70s and early 80s people were really really going home about buying gold and there was early 80s the bubble mania the gold bubble mania really happened and it took really all the way until 2020 to kind of recover from that. There was just a really long period of time if you look at an inflation adjusted return graph that shows, you know, the prices obviously inflation adjusted means everything in that respect but keeping in mind too that commodities don't pay dividends right or cash well. Well, that's very good. Thank you Dick for sharing that. You know, I think what we really would like to do is kind of spend our last time together here, you know, talking about defining quality and our portfolios and really kind of bringing it back to planning. You know, when you kind of sit down and look at, you know, kind of the bonds that you are looking to acquire in the portfolio, what are some of the first things that come to mind for you and then what are kind of high level core requirements for you when you look at investing in high quality. Yeah, certainly I mean cash flow first and foremost is is really number one right so you make a loan to someone you want to make sure that they have the cash flow to be able to pay you back and looking at different debt metrics such as debt service coverage ratios right. You know, this is your debt that they're owed well how many times could they pay that twice could they pay that three times could they pay that four times we can look at to technical but like a net debt over EBITDA so EBITDA measure of cash flow net debt being the level of cash less the amount of cash on hand right there. There are some companies out there that especially the large cap tech companies that have either more cash than debt or a very close match between cash and debt and you know, think of it bringing it personal let's say you have a mortgage of $100,000 but you also have $100,000 of cash in the bank that's probably a pretty safe bet I would say that you're going to be be paid back with interest if if anything else you might be paid back early. So those are really boils down to cash flow with the beautiful thing about bond investing is we're not really focused on that multiple expansion or contraction you know, they're way of looking at sentiment out in the out in the market place so yeah you know, you mentioned planning just to tie that analysis back to planning. We know what we know and that's you know spending to the extent that we can obviously there are one time things that are going to come up but we can have a good guesstimate of where spending is going to be for the year and therefore you know, offset that by what's coming in right whether that be job income you know pensions social security and then try to fill the gap right so let's build a portfolio where we can really withstand any sort of market correction. Right and the goal is to have the client be like you know what even if stocks drop 20% we're still going to be okay right because I have X amount in money market fund that's generating this amount in cash I have. Why amount in the investment grade bond portfolio is generating this you know for fun I own silver and gold and you know I get a little excited about chasing Bitcoin so. I would recommend nation is always keep it single digit percentages is just just in case right we we've seen them drop 80% right we don't want it to dent that overall plan and then the rest of the pile you know throw it in the market right we we have great partners at at Ellen Becker that are investing in stocks there's there's passive products out there that can really be a anchor to the portfolio and just know there's going to be ups and downs but you know like we said earlier in the show. Longer term the stock port stock portfolios are going to perform cash and bonds. I was going to ask you to when you think about investing individual bonds which is your area of expertise versus buying a bond you know like ETF or or mutual fund just what are the key like the very top differences or maybe the biggest risk that would be involved with that. Yeah certainly so the majority of bond ETFs and mutual funds out there have a much longer duration think eight to 10 years and duration another way to look at that is the average length to maturity so if you have a 10 year ladder with 10% coming do every single year. Well you have one bond that's coming do within the year you have another bond that's coming do within two years your average length the maturity is is less than five years to come out to four and a half to you know four point seven years so by having a shorter time to duration that limits your interest rate risk and we saw that. I mean really front and center in 2022 right when covid the 10 year was at 0.5% then post covid inflation hit in 22 and then all of a sudden we had a 10 year above five right so from 0.5 to 5.0% on the 10 year and that through a lot of those I mean the the Bloomberg aggregate bond index is just getting back to break even right since that time period in 2022 right that was four years ago. And so that's by by creating a bond ladder with direct investment grade bonds were able to fully customize that per the per the client right let's say they want to three year later five year later our standard is a 10 year ladder because I think that is a good starting point but we can even further customize that for every single client really match match the plan match the needs. And then and then also incorporate that risk tolerance question right some some clients want to be more risk a verse and some clients want to be more seeking. And with respect to the quality and that area of the portfolio being really a core right when we do do those 10 year ladders were being very thoughtful about when those maturities come due does it make sense to reinvest those maturities at the long into the curve or do we use it right now for current spending or maybe with the markets there might be another I guess mindset or strategy involved with that. One thing I did want to mention to is that we talked earlier about what people's required returns are in order to be successful with their goals when we sit down with our clients we don't as we're planning we software that you know our team has been really trained well on in terms of how to use it well and it's not just a simple throw the number right like we want our clients to put some thought into this so. And when we put the bond and stock portfolios together and we run scenarios the last thing we want is for a client that's two years out from retirement to stop and think about well hey the market's down do I have to keep working so we're constantly stress testing these portfolios and looking at providing downside protection and I think that's. Really important because our teams that would we work with our clients we want to have five to six years of income protected and that predominantly is inside of the fixed income or bond portfolios that you're managing for us totally the I agree the. The biggest nightmare scenario I mean the client relationships that keep me up at night are we hit a. Territor loyal correction we hit a 20 30% and the client just says I can't I can't stomach this I can't take any more the markets down 30% it's going to go down 50% I know it you know give me out of stocks and buy bonds and cash and you know at the end of the day it is the clients money I'm sure you and I would make recommendations to say. We actually should kind of be thinking about using that bond maturity to buy stocks at these levels right they're on sale you know the stock markets the only. Only store in America when it goes on sale everyone runs out of the store and it's just it's a little bit of a reverse psychology to try to fight that but that's why you have advisers for right I think some of the biggest value and we can be our more emotional psychological coaches right because money is emotional especially when we have some some volatility right which I'd expect to see more in 26 it's everyone's livelihood right and making sure that we're staying on the path and it's those times of volatility or periods of inflection in the market where we you know it's where we. Do our jobs exactly know educating clients and helping them along the way and that's where when we kind of look at our philosophy we have our five investment pillars which a couple of those we've talked about today already the highest of quality where we're at right we can't always you know say we're going to get the best exact investment but we're going to pick the best of the investments available out there diversification we want to make sure that we're. Transparent with our clients in terms of what they're paying you know I've read books and talk to people that have spent a lot of time discussing and analyzing different investment products that are complex and as a result of complexity comes costs we like to try to keep thing very things very simple and then really the two other ones I mentioned earlier income protection and then one of the main ones is planning around taxes so you know kind of breaking things down in a sense that allows us to plan for legacy to plan for what's happening now and then what's happening for a nice period of duration during say like a retirement period and that that's what we do we really help in our clients figure out how to have enough confidence and retire to the right things rather than retire from. Making money and then that figuring out how to retire comfortably or with the plan right so. Any final thoughts or anything that you'd like to share about the year ahead with the markets yeah no I thought you know you know that I'm ahead and what you just described is what is the most rewarding part of this job. Prior use to manage money for institutions foundations there wasn't a person there is a plan trustee but there wasn't a family of real. Family or taking care of on the other side of the table and that's what makes what we do so special so. Yeah it's for 26 you know buckle up I think we're going to see a little bit more volatility than we did maybe the last two years but I know we'll we'll stand it we'll get through it we've been through a lot of this together so there will be more bear markets and there will be more bull markets so that's right. Thank you Dick for everything today and as always we thank you all for listening to our podcast and if you enjoyed our show please reach out to Ellen Becker our number is 262 6 913200 and we hope that we've made a positive difference in your outlook and financial well being. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of Money Sense brought to you by Ellen Becker investment group few found today's conversation helpful we encourage you to share it with a friend or family member and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an episode. At Ellen Becker investment group we believe that education is the foundation of confident financial decisions that's why we're proud to bring you insights from experience professionals to help you build true wealth beyond just money. 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