Ben Carlson, CFA, author of Risk & Reward, joins the podcast to discuss why successful investing is often less about finding the perfect strategy and more about keeping things simple and sticking with a plan. We discuss the challenges of private equity, bonds and TIPS, inflation hedges, investor behavior, and why portfolio changes should generally be driven by life changes rather than market headlines. Ben also shares how his investing philosophy has evolved, including his thoughts on factor investing, momentum, and using a little “fun money” as a behavioral release valve. Finally, we dig into increasingly popular tax-aware strategies such as direct indexing and long-short tax-loss harvesting, including whether the potential tax savings are worth the added costs and complexity. Ben sums up much of the conversation with three words: “Less is more.”
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Jon Luskin, CFP®, a long-time Boglehead and financial planner, hosts this episode of the podcast. The Bogleheads® are a group of like-minded individual investors who follow the general investment and business beliefs of John C. Bogle, founder and former CEO of the Vanguard Group. It is a conflict-free community where individual investors reach out and provide education, assistance, and relevant information to other investors of all experience levels at no cost. The organization supports a free forum at Bogleheads.org, and the wiki site is Bogleheads® wiki.
Since 2000, the Bogleheads® have held national conferences in major cities across the country. In addition, local Chapters and foreign Chapters meet regularly, and new Chapters form periodically. All Bogleheads activities are coordinated by volunteers who contribute their time and talent.
This podcast is supported by the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, a non-profit organization approved by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) public charity on February 6, 2012. Your tax-deductible donation to the Bogle Center is appreciated.
Listen On
Show Notes
Ben Felix on Simplicity, Private Equity, Factor Investing, & Living a Good Life: Bogleheads® on Investing Episode 95
Financial Historian Mark Higgins in Fireside Chat with Bill Bernstein
You Can Spend More in Retirement with Bill Bengen: Bogleheads® on Investing Episode 92
TIPS Ladders with Kevin Esler
Owning Individual Bonds vs. Owning a Bond Fund
Bogleheads® Live with J.L. Collins: Episode 19
2025 Bogleheads Conference Recordings
2026 Bogleheads Conference
Transcript
00:00:00 Jon Luskin
Coming up on the Bogleheads On Investing Podcast:
00:00:03 Ben Carlson
It’s funny working in the wealth management industry, dealing with wealthy individuals. Still, they want to know, like, “But really, tell me.” Like, there has to be some wink-wink secret path here, right? There’s some way to do this, right? All of the upside, none of the downside. I think I say, “Let me tell you the secret to investing.”
00:00:19 Jon Luskin
Our guest is Ben Carlson, CFA, author of Risk & Reward, blogger at A Wealth of Common Sense, and co-host of The Animal Spirits Podcast. We discuss inflation hedges, TIPS, long-short tax-aware strategies, and much more.
I’m Jon Luskin, your host for this episode. Stick around until the end for my final thoughts. And as with other episodes, you can get a little bit more out of the show by watching the video version on YouTube, including getting to see some of Ben’s favorite investing charts. Now, onto the episode.
Ben, I love how you open your book. Why don’t you read us a couple of those introductory lines and then tell us a little bit more about that?
Investing “secrets”
00:00:59 Ben Carlson
Sure. I’d probably pull it off the top of my head. I think I say, “Let me tell you the secret to investing. There is no secret.” It’s funny working in the wealth management industry, dealing with wealthy individuals. I think intuitively they know, of course there’s no holy grail, there’s no easy way to do this, right?
All of the risk, none of the downside, all of that stuff. But still, they want to know, like, “But really, tell me. Like, there has to be some wink-wink secret path here, right? There’s some way to do this, right?”
All of the upside, none of the downside. Sidestep all the bad stuff. Invest when the dust is settled, all that thing. And my years of experience in this industry have just taught me that it really doesn’t exist.
00:01:38 Jon Luskin
Yeah, I certainly get that comment in working with some do-it-yourselfers sometimes, right? They say, “Hey, I want high growth, but I don’t want any downside.” Maybe that’s a good segue into private equity. And this is certainly a question we got from the community about it. What are your thoughts on that sort of investment?
Private Equity
00:01:54 Ben Carlson
Sure. So I came up in the institutional world where, at a time when David Swensen was just becoming a household name for institutional investors. For those who don’t know who he is, he is the CIO, former CIO of Yale Endowment Fund and he had this idea that, hey, listen, these endowment funds are meant to invest in perpetuity. They’re going to be here forever, essentially, right? Sure, we have short-term needs, but the money’s long-term. So we have the ability to take more risk.
And he did that through illiquid investments. And he was one of the first ones to really get there. It was this space that really wasn’t very crowded yet, and he did it, and the Yale returns were phenomenal. And he kind of went where people weren’t, where the crowd wasn’t, and took a ton of equity risk to do so, illiquidity risk and such, but grew the Yale endowment at a substantial pace.
And he’s written a couple of books. And it’s funny, one of his books told individual investors, “I’ve done the hard way this way. You should probably just index.” And that was kind of my takeaway being in the institutional world.
One of the funds that I worked at, we manage money for a billionaire family. And they kind of said, “We want the hedge funds. We want the private equity. We want the venture capital.” And we were a three-person investment team. And I was kind of the low man on the totem pole. And I was tasked with tracking these private investments. And this was my first really foray into it.
And that made me realize how challenging it really is, because the way that these investments work, it’s not like you give a manager all the money on day one and then it gets invested and you can track it. It’s, hey, the money comes due when they have an investment ready to make. So they do a capital call. The money may come back to you when they sell an investment. You don’t actually give them all the money. So it’s hard to kind of know how you’re doing.
And you have to give them the money for it could be 10 to 12 years that they actually get the money invested in. And you don’t really know how good this fund’s doing for years and years and years into the future, because it’s illiquid and because they’re kind of climbing up the marks themselves. So it’s an operationally challenging investment.
The illiquid nature of it, some people like because, “Hey, I don’t feel the volatility,” even though it’s kind of like Schrödinger’s cat in a lot of ways, right? Schrödinger’s portfolio, I guess. But I think private equity is a really challenging space to be as an investor, because you don’t really ever know how you’re doing.
And there are funds now that are made for advisors and individuals that kind of try to fix some of those problems. They’re evergreen funds. And you give them the money, and a lot of it’s already invested. So they have tried to get around this problem. But I think for most people, the illiquid nature of them and the sort of black box behind it and not understanding and knowing what you’re investing in makes it way more challenging than public markets.
00:04:33 Jon Luskin
We interviewed Ben Felix recently, and he’d certainly give his thoughts on private equity. I’ll link to that in the show notes for folks to check out. There was a great quote by Dr. Bill Bernstein at the Bogleheads Conference. I’m going to put that into the episode right here so you guys can enjoy it.
00:04:48 Bill Bernstein
And the mistake that people make when they read that book is that they assume it’s about the second two words, portfolio management. No, that’s not what the book was about. The book was about being pioneering.
It was being the first person, okay? The first person to the buffet table who gets the lobster tails and the prime rib, okay? That’s what David Swensen got.
And the people behind David Swensen, all the other endowments who imitated him and all the other investment managers, professional investment managers who imitate him to this day got the tuna noodle casserole.
Okay? There’s a whole lot of tuna noodle casserole that is still out there. And it is starting to ferment, okay? And they are trying to unload it on Vanguard.
00:05:35 Jon Luskin
And I’ll link to that whole session from the Bogleheads Conference in the show notes for you to check out.
Simple because it’s complex is something I run into a lot when working with do-it-yourselfers. They just want to make the most complicated investment plans. And you talk about this in the book. Tell us more about that.
Simplicity
00:05:48 Ben Carlson
Yeah. This kind of harks back to my days in the institutional world where I saw very intelligent people. These people were very highly educated. They had all these different designations and degrees and were very intelligent. And they almost thought that complex was better.
And I realized right away, especially going through the Great Financial Crisis, that, oh my gosh, complex is way harder to manage during a downturn. Because the thing you have to ask yourself in a downturn is, “Am I going to double down here on these assets that are performing poorly?” And it’s much harder to reinvest into the pain when you don’t understand something or you don’t believe in it.
And I think that’s where simple tends to shine through, is if you know what you own in your portfolio and why you own it, it’s way easier to rebalance into the pain and say, “Listen, this is not working right now. I don’t know when it’s going to work again, but it’s down and I’m willing to put it back in.”
And I think the thing with complex strategies is it’s way easier to hit the eject button and just go, “You know what? I’m done with this one, it’s not working. I’m going to try another one that sounds even better, and it’s been doing better lately.” And I think that’s the problem, is you get into this game of musical chairs when you have more complicated strategies.
And simple in many ways is harder because it requires you to do a lot of heavy lifting upfront and go, you know, “I’m going to pick these couple of few handful of strategies and I’m going to stick with them. And there’s all these other strategies out there that could be good for other investors, but they’re not necessarily right for me.” And I think that’s really hard for people to realize because it’s like, oh, you really have to be disciplined and know what you’re doing.
Bonds
00:07:23 Jon Luskin
I certainly want to talk about bonds because I feel like investors are still shell-shocked from the 100-year bond flood we had.
00:07:30 Ben Carlson
I think there’s a lot of consternation about bonds right now. And people are asking, “Are bonds still a good diversifier?” So I looked at what the average return was in the stock market for the past 100 years or so when the stock market was down in the United States. So here’s the line. The average return for stocks in 26 years, these are the down years, was negative 13.5%. During those same years, bonds averaged gains of 4.3%. That’s pretty good.
Now, of course, the one that sticks out in everyone’s mind is the last time this happened, which was 2022. High-quality bonds were down roughly 18%. If you owned a bond index fund, that’s about what it was down. Pretty much the same as the stock market. And here’s another line from what I wrote, “Diversification doesn’t work all the time. There were four years when stocks and bonds were both down in the same year,” right? And my whole point was everything underperforms eventually.
And obviously, the hard part about 2022 was the bond market was one of the big reasons that the stock market fell because inflation was higher. And I do think that there was this idea for 40-plus years when interest rates were just on a steady decline, that bonds were a one-decision asset class. I just put my money into some sort of high-quality bonds, government bonds or the AGG or a total bond index fund, and that’s it. And I got a decent yield. And then the yields go down and I get a price bump. And I think it was relatively easy for a bond investor.
And then 2022 happened and we go, “Oh my gosh, it’s been four-plus decades since we’ve had high inflation like this and rapidly rising rates.” And then you realize there’s another side to this. And bonds can get killed in that, especially if you have some duration. So I think there’s always been this idea that diversification made sense. But I don’t think people have thought too much about diversification within their bonds.
And I think that’s something that’s now come to the forefront, that, “Oh man, maybe I have to set my bond portfolio up for different economic environments,” right? Not just falling rates or flight to safety during a recession, which is when bonds have typically held up there as the ballast of the portfolio. But what happens if rates do rise? What happens if inflation is a little higher than it was for the past 10, 15, 20 years? What do I do then? And I think people have had to realize that there are other areas of the bond market that maybe make sense from a diversification standpoint, instead of just that one decision that was so easy to make for so long.
00:09:43 Jon Luskin
That’s really interesting. Let’s talk more about that. What does that bond portfolio look like? And for context, that Bogleheads Three Fund Portfolio, we’re looking at pretty often a total market bond fund. So what would the alternative to that be?
00:09:57 Ben Carlson
So I still think there’s a place for that as the anchor of the bond portfolio, right? And especially now, it’s funny, everyone hates bonds, but the yields on that are approaching if you are in a total bond market index fund right now, you’re getting nearly 5%. I think I looked this week, the AGG was a yield to maturity of like 4.7%. So pretty good, right? That’s a pretty good yield. Certainly better than the yields you were getting at any time for the past 15 years or so, right? The last 12 months has been the best yields we’ve gotten. And so I do think it’s a little premature for people to completely give up on bonds just because inflation is a little higher and there’s a worry that maybe rates go even higher than they are, right? Rates have been rising kind of steadily for the past few months because as people realize that inflation might be here for a little longer.
I certainly think that enough investors understood that T-bills and/or some sort of cash equivalent actually has a place in a rising rate environment. And I think there’s always been this idea that cash is trash and why would you ever use it in your portfolio? Because it just loses to inflation or maybe keeps up with inflation over time. And yields were so low on cash for so long coming out of the Great Financial Crisis that I think people kind of gave up on it. And then once we saw, oh my gosh, when the Fed raises rates like that and inflation rises and rates rise so fast, a short-term position in cash, I’m talking money markets, CDs, high-yield savings account, T-bills, that sort of thing, those kind of cash equivalents, it’s actually a pretty good hedge for those kind of environments because the yields are so short-term that you don’t really have interest rate risk. And you don’t have the nominal losses that you can see in bonds on a price basis. So I think people have realized maybe for part of the bond portfolio, even a cash position makes sense. It’s one of the simpler hedges against rapidly rising rates and inflation.
And then, of course, the TIPS piece. Now, I got a lot of questions about TIPS in 2022 and 2023. There was people who said, “I thought inflation was going to rise and I put my money into a TIPS fund, and then that got killed too.” And the thing is, if you have duration on a TIPS fund, when rates rise, it’s going to act more like a bond than it is inflation protection. So I think for that, probably, and I know a lot of Bogleheads are familiar with a TIPS ladder, probably helps you protect you a little on that. Even maybe the way I look at it is a short-term TIPS fund. It might not get you a higher yield, but if you go more short duration in TIPS, it rips out the bond piece and gives you more of just that inflation protection.
And so I think those areas are where people can kind of figure out how to diversify. Though there are plenty of other places that you can invest in in the bond area, they couldn’t in the past, right? There’s these floating rate notes that you can invest in. Private credit is something people have talked about. There’s a lot more complicated areas of the bond market that you can invest in these days. But I actually think the simpler approaches kind of help in the bond area as well, just like the stock market.
00:12:51 Jon Luskin
Yeah, I agree. Simple is often better. For those folks who want to learn more about the role cash plays in a portfolio, we interviewed Bill Bengen on a recent episode of the podcast. I’ll link to that in the show notes for folks to check out. And for folks who want to learn more about creating a TIPS ladder, we had a presentation at last year’s Bogleheads Conference. I’ll link to that as well.
All right, since we’re talking about bonds and you touched on this already, let’s jump to a question we got from the Bogleheads forums. This one is from username Chicagoprof. He asked about ladders versus bond funds. You touched on this just a moment ago. Anything else you want to share with respect to making that decision for investors?
00:13:29 Ben Carlson
It’s funny because there are people who have very strong opinions about owning individual bonds versus bond funds. This is something I didn’t really realize. I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago, and I got more feedback than I’d gotten in a long time. And there are a lot of people who like the psychological break or the psychological release you get from owning individual bonds because they say, “Listen, a bond fund can go down in price, but if I hold my bonds to maturity, I’m fine.”
From a psychological perspective, that does make sense. But it’s a little like the private equity illiquidity thing, right? Where a bond fund is just a fund of individual bonds. Just they happen to be targeting a specific maturity or duration or credit quality or whatever it is that tries to keep it relatively close to some benchmark or average. And so if inflation does increase and you own these bonds in a ladder, and rates increase, it’s still going to impact what you could get because you could have then gotten a higher rate in the market.
So I do think that ladders actually help from, they can help from an interest rate risk perspective. It’s kind of like dollar cost averaging in a way, right? You’re spreading your interest rate bets, sometimes higher, sometimes lower when they mature and if you reinvest. So I do think it kind of spreads your bets and it’s a different form of diversification. But you can certainly create a bond ladder or a different maturity profile using mutual funds or ETFs, right? It’s simple enough to do these days. I know they even have target date maturity ETFs.
And so there’s a lot of different ways to do it. But I think the biggest benefit to a ladder for most people is just the psychology behind it, right? And not having to look at the price going down and thinking, even though the price of your individual bonds is going down as well, in your head, you think, “Well, it’s fine. I’m going to get it back at par anyway.” So I think that’s more of a behavioral tool than anything. And maybe it does help with interest rate risk a little bit, but it’s not like the total savior that some people make it out to be.
00:15:20 Jon Luskin
And that is a really great blog post that you did write on that topic. It’s funny, someone asked me this question recently, and I just sent them that article because you did such a good job on that. I’ll link to that in the show notes for folks to check out as well.
00:15:32 Ben Carlson
And any hate mail on individual bonds versus bond funds, send them to Jon, not me. Thank you.
Inflation
00:15:35 Jon Luskin
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Or just put them in the YouTube comments. Let me know about what I’m doing wrong in the podcast. Let’s talk about inflation. In your book you talk about the three best inflation hedges. Tell us what they are.
00:15:49 Ben Carlson
Sure. I think this is something that people haven’t really put much thought into until this decade because we had four decades or so where inflation was relatively tame. And really coming out of the Great Financial Crisis, it was like 1 to 2% per year. It was really low. We go to 9% inflation. And that’s why I really wanted to write about that topic in the book because it seems like something that a lot of people didn’t have a lot of experience with.
In a lot of ways, I think some people want inflation to be this thing where you find the right portfolio hedge, right? It’s gold or Bitcoin or TIPS or whatever it is. You find the perfect hedge against inflation. And I look at it more from a personal finance household perspective, where I say the best inflation hedges are a good job where you can hopefully increase your salary at or above the rate of inflation and that you’re just desirable to an employer.
30-year rate mortgage, fixed rate mortgage. I think if you looked at that in investment terms, it’s funny because a lot of other countries don’t have that 30-year fixed rate mortgage. If inflation rises and rates rise in places like Europe and Canada, they actually have more adjustable rate mortgages that will be cranked up and see their monthly payment increase. So if you want to look at it from an investment perspective, I do think a 30-year fixed rate mortgage is kind of like you’re shorting the US dollar, right?
If you just buried your money in the backyard in cash, it’s going to go down in value because inflation will eat it up, right? I think the number I use in the book is at a 3% inflation rate, the value of a dollar will be cut in half in 20-plus years, like 22 years or something like that, I think, right? So you can think of a fixed rate mortgage as something of a short dollar bet that you know the dollar is going to go down because inflation will go up assuming growth keeps happening.
And then finally, just stocks for the long run, right? In the short run, the stock market can get dinged by higher inflation, as we saw in 2022, right? High and/or rising inflation from one year to the next. There’s some stats in the book about that. It can hurt the stock market in the short run, but in the long term, the stock market still remains your best bet to beat inflation. And I think the number of the past 100 years is in the 6 to 7% range of real returns for stocks, which is over the rate of inflation, which is much better than bonds or cash or any other asset there is really.
00:18:03 Jon Luskin
And if you’re already retired, maybe that inflation hedge isn’t necessarily a good job, but it’s delaying Social Security. Delay Social Security, you get a bigger benefit. That bigger benefit increases with inflation. That’s also a great inflation hedge. Earlier, you mentioned having TIPS as part of that bond portfolio. That begs the question, if I have stocks in my portfolio, do I still need TIPS?
TIPS
00:18:24 Ben Carlson
I think TIPS are one of the more unique asset classes that is available. It’s technically a bond, but it’s almost like this alternative asset class where, you know, because sometimes gold works to hedge against inflation, other times it doesn’t, right? There’s no asset class that really gives you a one-to-one for inflation like TIPS do.
And I think especially when yields are a little higher like they are today, it’s a pretty good value for investors when the nominal yields are above, say, 2% or so, which they are today. It’s just very unique in that it just does give you that one-for-one inflation hedge. And so I think the fact that it’s such a unique asset class that can give you this diversification, you really can’t find anywhere else.
00:19:06 Jon Luskin
You mentioned something really interesting just now. TIPS look good today. So with respect to we’re being a long-term investor, we’re designing a portfolio for the long term, is that something we should be thinking about? Hey, TIPS look good now versus maybe they don’t look good at some other point in time, and we don’t necessarily want to include them in our portfolio?
00:19:26 Ben Carlson
Yeah, I guess it depends how much you want to be a bond fund manager in these things. The way that I look at bonds is not trying to, and we do this for our firm too. So I’m in the investment committee for our firm. We always look at it in terms of the risk and reward. What risk are you being paid to take right now? And what’s the reward look like?
And I do think there’s probably a difference when TIPS yields were negative in the early 2020s that just not that great of an investment. And that’s one of the reasons that they did kind of struggle. Now the nominal yield is much better. I do think you can probably say that there’s a time where TIPS make more sense than others. But I really think it depends how active you want to be in the bond part of your portfolio and how much value you can add.
So I think that’s certainly a question because the bond piece of the portfolio is, I think, supposed to be boring, right? You take risk where you’re in volatility where you’re being paid to take it, which to me is the stock market. And so I think trying to squeeze a little bit more juice out of the bond market and trying to time these things by jumping in and jumping out, it sounds interesting, but it’s probably only helpful at the extremes.
I think the most extreme example we’ve had this decade was just when bond yields were so low because of the pandemic, right? And the whole Treasury yield curve at one point was at 1% or lower. And at that point, it didn’t really make sense to take anything in terms of duration because any little bump up in yields was going to crush you in bonds, which is what happened, right? Yields went up, and I don’t think anyone was predicting that the Fed was going to take yields from 0% to 5% in that short of a timeframe.
So that’s obviously where bond investors got kind of spooked and caught offsides. But I think that’s the kind of time where you look at the risk-reward setup and you go, “Boy, taking any sort of long duration risk here just makes no sense because if yields keep falling and they go to zero or negative, I squeeze a little more juice out of it, a little more toothpaste out of the tube. But if yields rise, I’m going to get crushed.”
So it’s like the opposite of the risk profile that you want to take. That’s kind of the way that I think about if you want to time these things in bonds, that it makes sense. It’s really those extremes. And other times, I don’t think you’re adding a lot of value by just kind of jumping in and out of these different segments of the bond market.
00:21:34 Jon Luskin
Had a great line in the book about just this. Let’s have you read it for us.
Loss Aversion
00:21:38 Ben Carlson
“The more frequently you look at your portfolio, the more likely you are to experience a sting from loss aversion since losses are more frequent in the short term.” Yeah, this is the concept that I think is, I titled in the book, it’s the most important concept in all of finance, just because losses are so painful. And it’s funny, I talk to my kids about this with our favorite sports teams. I try to explain to them the concept of loss aversion. And I tell my daughter, you know what feels better and what feels worse? When you see your team win, it feels good. Or when you see your team lose, it feels bad. And she’s like, “The losses. It’s so painful when you watch your favorite team lose.” And I said, “Yeah, that’s loss aversion.” And I shared some quotes in the book about it.
And I think that’s what, because of the fact that the stock market is so much more volatile in the short term, and the numbers are really surprising that you, on a daily basis, the stock market is up like 53 or 54% of the time, right? So it’s a little better than a coin flip on a daily basis that the stock market is going to be positive or negative. And obviously, the longer out you go, the higher your odds are of success. So the thing is, if you’re looking all the time, the chances of seeing a loss and having those losses sting is much higher.
I think the number I use in the book was, since 1950, 7% of all trading days are all-time highs, which is pretty good, actually, right? Inverting that means 93% of the time you’re kind of looking up at an all-time high from a drawdown. Now, it doesn’t mean it always has to be a big drawdown, but it shows that most of the time you’re in a state of drawdown and seeing losses. So if you’re always kind of anchoring to that really high level of the stock market or your portfolio, it can sting the more you look at it.
And I don’t know. I think I update my portfolio values once every six months maybe. It’s probably better if I did it every 12 months. And of course, in the back of my head, I know what it is based on the market because I know what the market is kind of doing. But it’s funny. Even I, I have this thing where I will not look at my account statements or my portfolio values when we’re in a downturn. I don’t think it’s helpful to me to see those values being lower and seeing that cash that’s been incinerated by the stock market. So I think sometimes it’s good to help have some space in between yourself to avoid having those feelings of loss because everyone has them. It’s just like human nature.
00:23:53 Jon Luskin
I worked with someone recently who was concerned about bond volatility, and my answer was just, “Don’t look at it.”
So in the book, you do a great job talking about the long term, and I think that helps people focus on that. And the book is pretty evergreen in that respect. Your podcast, Animal Spirits, it hits a little bit differently. It’s more timely. While certainly you’re talking about the long term, you’re also talking about things like IBM losing 23% in a day. How do you think about that divergence between encouraging investors to focus on the long term while also spending a lot of time talking about what’s happening in the markets right now?
00:24:27 Ben Carlson
Yeah, great question. I think there’s this cliché that almost every financial advisor uses. I think you get your CFP and they hand you a plaque that says this phrase on it. It says, you tell your clients, “Just ignore the noise,” right? And it’s great sounding advice. Just ignore the noise. Don’t worry about it.
And my contention is that it’s harder than ever to actually ignore the noise today because you have these little pieces of glass in your pocket that are giving you 24/7 alerts, and people are constantly talking about the markets. I remember I wrote a piece about the 1987 crash at one point, and I got an email from a guy who said, “Listen, I lived through the 1987 crash. I didn’t know it happened until I was driving home and I turned the radio on. And then they tell me that the stock market fell 20% and we might go into a depression.”
And obviously, if something like that happens today, you’re following along on a tick-by-tick basis if you want to, right? You’re paying attention. And I think it’s harder than ever to avoid paying attention. So I think what you have to do, as opposed to drinking out of the fire hose, that’s just, I mean, there’s so many ways to get information these days.
It’s not only 24/7 news in financial media. There are newsletters and social media and podcasts and all this talking heads that are just constantly giving you opinions. And so the way that I could think about it is you have to have good filters in place. And I think maybe by talking about what’s going on in the markets, I’m trying to figure out filtering like: This is actually useful information. This is not useful, but it’s interesting.
I think selfishly, I really love following the markets. I think it’s one of the most interesting case studies in human nature that there is because it’s constant emotions and people are the ones that are controlling it. So I think following the markets to me is just really inherently interesting.
But I think also, I’m not a big comic book guy, but my colleague Josh Brown always likes to use this analogy. There’s something in one of the Avengers movies where they ask the Hulk, the Incredible Hulk, like, “How did you finally learn to control all your rage and just become Bruce Banner and not the Hulk?” And he said, “Well, the thing is, I’m just angry all the time.”
And I do think that the more you pay attention to this stuff, from my perspective, the less it is, the less you are overreacting to it because you go, “Hey, listen, someone was worried about this two months ago. Now we’re worried about it again?” Guess what? This is the kind of thing that doesn’t matter.
So I think the way people get themselves in trouble, especially individual investors, is by paying attention here and there and jumping in and out, right? Like, “Oh, now it’s time to pay attention. I really have to do something,” right? And I think that’s where you get yourself in trouble is if you don’t know how to filter and you don’t know how to pay attention to the right things, and then you go, “Oh, wait, something’s going on right now. I see smoke and people are paying attention. There’s got to be something going on. Now I need to do something.”
And I think that’s where you get yourself in trouble. So I think my way of doing it is I’m trying to be like Bruce Banner where I guess I’m paying attention to it all the time and realizing that I’ve kind of become immune to it because for 15 years now, I’ve heard people talk about, “This is the next crisis, and that’s the next crisis, and no, this is it. This is the bubble.” And it’s like if you hear enough of that talk, it’s kind of like the boy who cried wolf where you kind of become immune to it in some ways.
00:27:45 Jon Luskin
You can correct me if I misheard you. It sounded like there are times when you should and shouldn’t pay attention. Is there a distinction there? If we’re a long-term investor, do we need to be paying attention at all?
00:27:56 Ben Carlson
It’s funny. When we talk to clients about when they’re going to make changes to their portfolios, we tell them, “Listen, we’re long-term investors, but there are times when the market sort of forces your hand.” And I talked about the bond market earlier, right? The risk-reward setup. But it tends to be the extremes.
For most people, it’s actually your personal circumstances that will dictate when a change to a portfolio happens. And I think that’s one of the misnomers that a lot of people have in portfolio management. They think, “Listen, when valuations hit this level, I’m going to do this.”
I think a lot of the portfolio management stuff from that perspective should be set up in advance, and there should be guidelines and rules in place in terms of rebalancing your portfolio, right? Within certain bands. I think you should set up a lot of those guidelines in advance.
And then the time you really have to make portfolio changes is when your life changes, right? I’m going to be spending more money. I’m going to be spending less money. Hey, we’re saving more now. We can take more risk. Hey, we’re saving less. Maybe we have to dial down the risk a little bit. I think a lot of those risk tolerance things really come from personal circumstances as opposed to the market.
But I do think that you can use the market as a way to kind of gauge when it makes sense to do certain things. But I think do you want to make wholesale portfolio changes because of what’s in the headlines? No, I think that’s a huge mistake.
00:29:11 Jon Luskin
Yeah, 100% agree. It’s those life changes when you need to make those portfolio changes, right? You’re getting closer to retirement. You want to take less risk. Maybe you’ve got a big windfall, selling a business, inheritance. Maybe now you can take more risk, right? It’s when your life changes, not necessarily what the market is doing.
Okay, let’s get into some more questions from the Bogleheads community. This one is from Bogleheads Reddit, username DiegoMilan, asks about what you’ve changed your mind about recently.
He references how JL Collins, who’s pretty big in the FIRE community, we actually had him as a guest on a Bogleheads Live show in the past. I’ll link to that in the show notes. So Collins, who’s a big US-only investor, has recently changed his mind, now includes international as well. What about yourself? What’s some changes you’ve made in your investing philosophy over time, Ben?
Investing Philosophy
00:30:01 Ben Carlson
You know, I think when I first started out, the John Bogle example of how to invest, really, the light bulb went off when I started reading his stuff early in my career. And index funds made sense to me immediately. I know for some people, it takes some time. It made sense to me. Plus, I was seeing all these active managers in my day job that were having a hard time outperforming the market. And so the idea of indexing really made sense to me right away.
I think what I’ve learned after dealing with a lot of different investors of all shapes and sizes over the years is just that there really isn’t one way to succeed in investing. But I think that there are just a small number of ways to fail in investing. And not everyone has to invest the same way to find success in their portfolio. There’s a lot of different paths to success. And I’ve seen these people by working with them.
So I think personality has a lot to do with how you do in your investments. And I think there are people who can be just spreadsheet warriors and robots, right? They’re the Spock that they can follow a plan, and they set their asset allocation, they rebalance occasionally, and they just more or less leave it alone. And I know that there are those people out there, and they dutifully invest and save. They can sit on their hands when there’s a correction or a crash. And some people are just hardwired to be good investors like that.
Then there are other people who need a behavioral release valve. And they will say, “Listen, I need to take 10% of my portfolio and just go nuts because that’s going to allow me to deal with the other 90%. So I want to be a tactical investor, or I want to pick stocks. I want to speculate. I want to buy crypto, whatever it is. If this piece allows me to scratch that itch and leave the other 90% alone.”
And I think for a lot of time, I would kind of say, “No, why would you want to do that in your…” But now I think the idea of sinning a little bit, to steal a phrase from Cliff Asness, I think it makes sense if you understand your lesser self that that’s going to actually help. Like, “Listen, I need to have some action. I’m kind of a junkie for gambling and going crazy, and I’m going to leave my retirement accounts alone, but my brokerage account, I’m going to go crazy.”
I actually think that makes sense for a lot of people, for some people, as long as you can understand and position size it well enough. Obviously, if you take too much of a risk and you’re doing a big chunk of your portfolio, that’s when you can get in trouble. But I think if you size it correctly, that’s probably something I’ve changed my mind about. I was under the impression that, “No, we all need to be robots. We all need to follow a plan, set it and forget it.” But I think some people just don’t have the ability to do that. And so really, it’s about knowing what you need to be successful as an investor.
00:32:39 Jon Luskin
One thing that I get anxious about with what I would call that cowboy account or that fun money account is that it has you pay attention more to what the markets are doing with that 5%, and then that may impact how you treat the rest of your money. But certainly, hey, having a little bit of play money, that’s not going to make or break you if you can only just stick to just that.
00:33:00 Ben Carlson
The funny part that you mentioned that is that I did this for a while. I had a 10% of my portfolio, and I tried to pick stocks. And the first thing it did was it showed me how hard it is, and it showed me that I just really underperformed all of my index funds.
But I also, I was realizing that, yeah, I was spending 90% of my time worried about this 10% of my portfolio. And you’re right, I’m checking it all the time. And I finally decided it’s not worth it for me because what’s the point of looking at this all the time? And oh my gosh, there’s an earnings release tonight. And what happens if the stock goes up 20% or down 20%? Because for individual stocks, that kind of thing actually happens more often than you think.
And that actually was enough for me to go, “Okay, I got this out of my system.” I did it for a while. I realized I have better things to do than worry about this. And it actually helped me.
And I hope that’s what happens with a lot of young people is they go through this and they do this with smaller amounts of money and kind of get those mistakes out, maybe pay some tuition to the market gods, and then realize like, “Okay, there is actually a simpler, easier, better way to do this.” And technology allows you to automate so much more of it now that you can take yourself out of the equation.
00:34:06 Jon Luskin
All right, this question comes from Bogleheads Reddit. buffinita asks about what are some of your favorite charts with respect to passive investing market timing? And we’ll put them on screen for our YouTube viewers to check out.
Market Timing
00:34:20 Ben Carlson
Sure. Especially if we’re talking about just the past 5 to 10, past decade or so, I think my favorite one is just to show the drawdown chart of the fact that there have been pretty good drawdowns this decade alone. We had a 35% drawdown in COVID. 2022 was a bear market. I think the S&P was down 25%. The NASDAQ was down 35%. For Liberation Day, we were down almost another 20%. And yet this decade, the stock market is up 15% per year, right?
I think if you kind of overlaid a lot of the economic data on the stock market, especially during COVID, the unemployment rate went to 14% while the stock market was bottoming and already moving up, right? And so I think one of these things that a lot of new investors try to think of is like, especially when there’s a downturn, it’s the idea of, “I’m just going to go to cash and wait till the dust settles, and then I’ll put it back to work,” right? And the problem is when this stuff is in the headlines, it’s already too late.
And so I think that was one of the more interesting lessons for investors during COVID was you had all these terrible headlines, and everything is going wrong, and it seems like the economy is never going to come back, and all the numbers are getting worse, and the unemployment rate is rising, and the stock market is rising too, and people are going, “This doesn’t make any sense.” And I think during those downturn periods, a lot of times the stock market moves way faster than anyone else. And that’s the hard part to wrap your head around is that the stock market moves before the data does sometimes, and it tries to be forward-looking.
Now, of course, the stock market is not always right. Sometimes the stock market moves, and it’s caught off guard, and it goes back down or it goes up. But I think that’s the good lesson for me this decade is that with all the bad stuff that’s happened, the pandemic and 9% inflation and tariffs and wars and all of these really nasty headlines, if you just kind of put those headlines on the stock market, you’d go, I mean, here’s a great example too. The war happened, oil prices spike, gas prices spike, and people go, “Why is the stock market not falling?”
That’s a good one where the headlines can really make it harder. Like you could have given me all the headlines for this decade, and I’d go, “Oh my gosh, that’s going to happen, and that’s going to happen, and that’s going to happen.” And I would have been completely wrong about the market’s reaction to those headlines. I think that’s the lesson is just, and so that’s another one of my favorite charts.
And we actually do this. My colleague Michael Batnick has this chart. He calls it Reasons to Sell. And he shows the line of the stock market going up and then all the bad things that have happened. And I think the hard part for investors to realize is that the good news is more like a process and not an event. But the bad news is an event. It’s a headline.
When bad news happens, you know it. Good news takes a lot longer to happen. Good news occurs more in the long term. There’s not really headlines that will proclaim, “Hey, this great thing happened,” because it happens over time. And that’s kind of the same thing with the stock market.
00:37:12 Jon Luskin
Yeah, that good news being corporate profits, economic growth, et cetera, not really a big headline, but that’s where your investment returns are coming from.
00:37:21 Ben Carlson
Exactly.
00:37:21 Jon Luskin
And we’ll put buffinita’s favorite chart on screen as well. Talks about low correlation is not inverse correlation. Our YouTube viewers can check that out. And if you’re listening on audio, be sure to check out the YouTube show where you can see all the charts we’re talking about.
All right, let’s talk about active management. This question is from jocdoc from the Bogleheads Forums. He’s asking about the Porterhouse portfolio. Tell us a little bit about what that Porterhouse portfolio is for context.
Momentum
00:37:51 Ben Carlson
Yeah, yeah, great question. So it’s a momentum strategy. It’s totally rules-based. And so I guess the active component of our client portfolios typically is the factor investing. And I guess my thoughts on indexing is that index funds themselves are nothing special, right? You can take all of the best of indexing, be that they’re kind of rules-based, they’re very long-term in nature, they’re tax-efficient, they don’t trade a ton, and you can apply those general principles to other investment strategies.
And the rules-based investing thing is probably the biggest one for me. I’m a huge proponent of making good decisions ahead of time, evidence-based decisions ahead of time, setting those guidelines, and then allowing those guidelines to act out. That doesn’t mean that they’re set in stone, you can never change them. But I think any good plan, and that could be for your portfolio, that could be for your investment strategies, that could be for your whole financial plan, I think any type of guidelines and sort of mile markers and limitations and rules, I think that’s a great way to, again, pull your lesser self out of the equation.
So I think a lot of people intuitively understand if I’m going to have a factor like small cap value, I think it’s been a big one for financial advisors over the years, right, as a way to, I think, probably try to squeeze a little more juice. But the way that I look at factors is I don’t look at them as a source of alpha. And I know a lot of advisors say, “Hey, if you invest in these factors, you can outperform.” I’ve never looked at them like that because I just think all these things are very cyclical.
I look at factor investing as a source of diversification. So first and foremost, that’s the idea of if you’re going to be different than the index, I want it to be a complement to a portfolio. That like if this piece of the portfolio is going to be lagging, maybe this piece picks it up a little bit. And I think living through the first decade of this century where the S&P 500 and like a Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund had a lost decade, I think living through that really just drilled home to me the importance of diversification and having other asset classes to pick up the slack.
Now, the funny thing is you had that 10-year period where diversification really saved your butt. And then the next 15 years, you would have been way better off just having your money in VOO or VTI, one of these large cap growth segments of the market. So obviously, there’s ebbs and flows. We had some sort of higher quality value segments of our portfolio. And the momentum factor, if you look at it, actually is a good complement to that. And so we look at it as kind of an offset.
And so if we’re going to do more of an active component to the portfolio, again, we want it to be rules-based. We don’t want it to be discretionary where someone is picking the stocks on their own. I always make the joke that no index fund has ever closed because the portfolio manager is getting a divorce and wants to spend more time with their family, right? This happens to hedge funds all the time, right? So any sort of quantitative rules-based, index fund-based, to me, that is, again, just easier to lean into the pain and understand like, “Okay, this is not working right now, but I’m comfortable rebalancing into it.”
It’s kind of funny because the momentum factor itself is not nearly as intuitive as value investing. Value investing, everyone gets. I’m going to buy a dollar for 50 cents or 60 cents or whatever it is, right? Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham, all that. Value investing is easy. And there’s a ton of money in value mutual funds and ETFs, right? Because people get it.
Momentum is kind of this different one because it’s more of a behavioral factor, and it deals more with herding and recency, and there is a little more turnover to it. But it can be a good diversifier because it acts as something of a chameleon. Now, a lot of people think, “Well, momentum, that just means tech stocks, just like tech are kind of growth stocks.” But really, it’s a kind of strategy that will pick whatever’s doing well. So if you’re in a, there could be dividend stocks that are having high momentum because they’re working in. It could be consumer staples. It could be different sectors. It could be different types of stocks. So that’s the thing where it just adds another element of diversification.
And that strategy itself, which is relatively new for us, is another one of those kind of scratch the itch ones where it’s not for every client. And some clients will say, “I don’t want it. I don’t need it.” And for us, that’s fine. So we have kind of the core models that we give to all of our clients. And then you have these other levers you can pull if you desire something a little more aggressive, more concentrated like that, and you want another form of diversification. But like I said, not all these strategies make sense for every investor. And I think that strategy kind of fits in that bucket.
00:42:29 Jon Luskin
That also helps answer our factor investing question we got from johnisonredditnow from Bogleheads Reddit. You mentioned index funds being tax-efficient. There is a new pitch out there. Maybe it’s not that new. There’s direct indexing with tax loss harvesting. And now, more recently, there’s long-short direct indexing factor strategies. What’s your take on these strategies?
Long-Short Direct Indexing
00:42:54 Ben Carlson
It’s interesting because we get tons of people coming to us now asking about this stuff. So this is not just like an advisor-led thing. It’s people who have, there are plenty of people who put money in Nvidia a few years ago or something or Tesla or Apple, or maybe they just got stock options from their firm, right? They work at Google and they got stock options and they have a really low basis and they have a huge capital gains tax. And these people, credit to them, they know that they should diversify their portfolio, right? I already kind of won the game. I picked an individual stock or a handful of individual stocks. They did really well, but they just can’t bring themselves to diversify and pay the tax because it’s really painful.
Like, “Ah, I want to diversify. I know I should. It’s a form of risk management,” right? There’s the old saying, “You concentrate to get rich. You diversify to stay rich.” And people recognize this. And so now, because it costs nothing to trade, there’s $0 commissions, you can do these direct indexes where you pick the individual stocks and use them for tax loss harvesting purposes. But there’s a limit to that sometimes, right? Especially if you’re in a bull market, not that many stocks go down. I think the average in a given year is something like, even if the stock market is up, 30% of stocks on average will fall in a given year. So there’s a decent minimum, but you can run out of these losses to harvest.
So now what you’re seeing is, “Okay, we’re going to open a margin account and we’re going to do a 130-30 fund where we borrow money, we tack on an additional 30% long strategies, but then we offset that with shorting 30% of stocks on the other side.” So it still nets out to 100% long portfolio, but you’re just adding more stocks and giving yourself the ability to harvest more losses. And this is the kind of strategy that we actually are working with. Canvas is a platform we use for direct indexing. AQR also has one. We work with them a little bit. And what we explain to clients is that this is one of those strategies that is certainly not for everyone.
And this, you and I talking earlier about simple versus complex, a lot of people will hear about this kind of strategy and immediately go, “Okay, I’m tapping out. This is way too complex for me.” And I think that there are certain people who say like, “Man, I hate paying taxes, but I want to keep it simple.” And there are other people, I’m sure you’ve worked with these people too. There are certain people that they will do anything to avoid a tax bill, right, or to decrease their tax bill. There’s a lot of people who just hate paying taxes and will do whatever they can. And so we say this is very situational. It has to be the kind of thing where you have a huge capital gain because you’re selling a business, you’re selling a piece of real estate, you’re selling a concentrated stock portfolio with a low basis or whatever it is.
It’s hard to see this as being some sort of baseline strategy. I also think this is not the kind of strategy that you can implement yourself as a DIYer just yet. Maybe you will in the future. But I think this is something that, and maybe this sounds self-serving because I work for an advisor, but I’ve seen how hard this can be to implement in practice because you kind of have to manage these positions and set like a budget in terms of tracking error and how much you’re going to harvest in a given year. And it’s more of an active strategy. But for those people who have specific situations, it’s pretty interesting.
I think my stance on this is a lot of people have learned over the years that like, “I’m not going to find alpha in my portfolio from stock picking,” right? The outperformance probably isn’t going to come from there unless I get lucky. So a lot of people have shifted that to, “Okay, I’m going to find after-tax alpha. That’s where I can add value is if I decrease my taxes I pay,” because everyone knows the only returns that matter are your net returns after all fees and after all taxes. And if you can add value on the tax side of things, you can actually improve your net outcomes. And that’s where people have landed, I think.
00:46:34 Jon Luskin
What are some of the downsides to this strategy and when would it not be a fit for someone?
00:46:38 Ben Carlson
The obvious downside that I just mentioned is it’s more complex. It’s a little harder to understand. I think some people are very hesitant to, “Oh my gosh, I’m shorting stocks and I’m using leverage.” And so for some people, that’s an immediate “Nope, not going to do it.” So I think that’s a problem.
I think the execution, you have to make sure you’re working with the right, not only advisor, but the right investment manager who understands, because this is effectively a hedge fund that you’re implementing, right? I think you have to understand the fees because there are certainly some investment managers that charge very high fees to do this. So you have to weigh the pros and the cons of, are the tax savings worth the fees that I’m paying for this?
And then you have to think about the fact that you may just be delaying the paying of, a lot of these strategies are more for deferrals than they are, it’s not like you’re totally getting rid of the taxes. You’re just figuring out a way to diversify your portfolio from maybe something that’s more concentrated to more diversified. And then you’re delaying, so you’re allowing the compounding to happen longer, but you’re still going to have to pay the taxes someday. And now maybe you’re stuck in this strategy for a number of years because you don’t want to rip the band-aid off and sell down the line because then what was the point of it?
00:47:46 Jon Luskin
How does one assess if the fee is worth the potential tax savings?
00:47:51 Ben Carlson
Yeah, I think that is something that you really have to run the numbers on these things, right? And you have to kind of not just the back of the envelope, but go through, like we kind of map this out for clients over the years. Like in year one, you can harvest X percentage of the portfolio in gains. Year two, this, year three, this. And then you look at the fees and understand.
And again, some of these managers can really crank it up. So I mentioned there’s like a 130-30, but there’s investment managers who go up to like a 250-50 or something or a 200, and they really crank up the leverage. And some of those that use more like a hedge fund strategy, the fees are much higher too. So I think you do have to kind of run a really detailed cost-benefit analysis to understand. And so for our clients, we kind of map it out. And generally, here’s how long it’s going to take, and you can do some kind of analysis.
But obviously, a lot of it is dependent on how the market performs, right? You can harvest way more losses if there’s a bear market. And so you can’t really prepare for these things in advance. So sometimes there has to be a little more back and forth between the advisor and the client in terms of like, when do you turn the dial up and when do you turn it down based on what the market is giving you?
Our tax expert always says that like, “It’s painful to pay taxes, but guess what? It also means you did something right and you won the game.” So there’s also an element of that. And we have certain clients who will say, “You know what? Let’s just do it and I’ll pay the taxes and I’ll move on.”
And so for certain people, they just go, “You know what? I don’t even want to deal with all this other stuff. I’ll pay the taxes. It kind of stings to write that check, but listen, I made a ton of money on this.” So for certain people, they come to that conclusion as well. And that’s fine too.
00:49:28 Jon Luskin
Ben, thanks so much for joining us for the Bogleheads on Investing podcast. We’re going to see you at the Bogleheads Conference this year.
00:49:34 Ben Carlson
Yep, I’ll be there. Can’t wait. First time.
00:49:36 Jon Luskin
Fantastic. We’re excited to have you. Any final thoughts before I let you go?
00:49:40 Ben Carlson
I guess the one thing I always tell people when I sign some of my books, I always write, “Less is more.” So those are my three words I’ll leave you with.
00:49:48 Jon Luskin
I love that. Thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you soon.
00:49:51 Ben Carlson
Thanks.
Jon’s Thoughts
00:49:52 Jon Luskin
That wraps up our interview with Ben. And with that, here are some of my thoughts from the interview. Let’s start with Ben’s comments on spreadsheet warriors.
00:50:00 Ben Carlson
I think there are people who can be just spreadsheet warriors and robots, right? They’re the Spock that they can follow a plan and they set their asset allocation, they rebalance occasionally, and they just more or less leave it alone.
And I know that there are those people out there and they dutifully invest and save. They can sit on their hands when there’s a correction or a crash. And some people are just hardwired to be good investors like that.
00:50:26 Jon Luskin
One thing about the spreadsheet warriors is that I found a lot of people think they’re spreadsheet warriors and they create a spreadsheet and they create a plan, but then they don’t maintain it. So that’s why, as always, I encourage folks to keep it simple. Make a plan that requires less maintenance, less spreadsheet time on your part. That’s going to increase your odds of success.
00:50:46 Ben Carlson
So a lot of people have shifted that to, “Okay, I’m going to find after-tax alpha. That’s where I can add value is if I decrease my taxes I pay.” You really have to run the numbers on these things, right? Like in year one, you can harvest X percentage of the portfolio in gains. Year two, this, year three, this. And then you look at the fees.
00:51:05 Jon Luskin
I understand the pain point of taxes. The thing with any sort of tax projections is that they’re just that. They’re not guaranteed. But what is guaranteed? The fees.
I think for that reason, for me personally, I would put any sort of tax optimization investment strategy like long-short direct indexing, tax loss harvesting into a sort of a fun money bucket. That is, “Hey, I’m going to throw some money at this and I’m going to be okay if this underperforms. I’m going to be okay if the fees eat up any of my tax savings.” That’s how much I dislike taxes.
I think going into it with that sort of framework can help you decide if signing up for one of these tax-optimized strategies really makes sense for you.
Thank you for joining us for the Bogleheads on Investing podcast. For more free financial education, be sure to check out our videos from the 2025 Bogleheads conference, all of which are now available on YouTube. Also, you’ll find countless shorts from both the conference and this podcast there too.
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