Hello and welcome. I'm Austin Root and on behalf of all of us at Stansberry Asset Management, thank you for joining. With me today are Deputy Chief Investment Officers and Portfolio Managers, Mario Valente and Michael Joseph. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Yeah, no, I'm really excited. We've got a full slate. We are going to help folks with the six keys to growing and protecting their wealth in 2026. It's a significant task, but I think we're up to that task. What do you think? Absolutely. Lots to cover. We're two weeks into the year and I feel like we have about a year's worth of news already. So lots to talk about. We got a lot planned. Now, before we divulge these six, I have a question for each of you. I'll start with you, Mario. Do you have a favorite among the six keys? I think my favorite, and this is probably cheating because it's one of the keys that I had worked on, and frankly, it's a no-brainer key, which is tax minimization. No, hang on. I don't want you to tell what the key is. You're going to have to say that. You should ask me a question. Do you have a favorite? All right. Good, good. Perfect. And the second question was going to be, is it one of the ones that you're presenting? And I could have guessed 100% on that. How about you, Michael? Do you have a favorite? I would have totally let one of the cats out of the proverbial bag there, so I'm glad you asked Mario first. Okay, good. Wow. Yeah, but yeah, there's definitely a few that are kind of highlights for me, and actually the ones that I'm not presenting that I'm more curious to hear how you guys are thinking about them. Good. Well, I do as well. Probably will be no surprise that the sixth and final one that I get to present is actually my favorite. It's kind of a catch-all for us, but I think it's super important. And with that, what do you say we get right to it? Lots to cover, so it sounds like a plan to me. Perfect. Awesome. Well, as we said, this is the six keys to growing and protecting your wealth in 2026. Here's kind of the way we've set this up. This is a unique webinar for two reasons, I think. One is that it includes both clients and prospects. I feel like many wealth managers will only have a client-only webinar, only a prospect-only, but we kind of want to, you know, the thoughts that we have for both audiences, we want to share with both audiences. But then that means includes, that means we should include a little bit about who we are and why. So we'll start on a couple slides on that. And then, you know, as we were brainstorming for this event, it's so interesting that the six keys really fell into three buckets. Two of these are two keys that we think everyone is talking about, and rightfully so, because they are important to how this market moves and how you, watching at home, are protecting or growing your wealth. So we think, you know, we'll give you our take on it. It's not exactly the consensus take, but it's important. These are important topics. The next two are topics that no one's talking about, but we think are mission critical. So we'll highlight those. And then finally, you know, for those of you who have kids or grandkids in sort of that teenage, preteen age, this is our version to have a hot take, where we can tell you on two topics where we think, you know, by and large, the consensus view is, we think, has it wrong. And then, of course, we're going to leave some time for Q&A. We've already received some good questions ahead of time, so we'll make sure to address those. But without further ado, let's get into it. And, you know, like I said, the first thing to talk about is kind of who is Sam? Well, we are an investment organization, an RIA, an SEC-registered investment organization with about $1.3 billion in assets under management. We serve families and individuals. We serve institutions and small businesses. We have clients and offices across the country, really across the world as it relates to clients. But most of our clients are in the U.S. We were founded almost a decade ago. So I know as we go into the year, we'll be talking a little more about lessons that we've learned over the first 10 years of life and celebrating that 10-year anniversary. It's only coincidental, but we do have 10 investment strategies across different goals. And, you know, most of our clients usually allocate to multiple strategies to satisfy their own unique families' goals and financial plans. And then we also have expanded into alternatives, starting our first alternatives investment strategy in 2023. We'll talk a little bit about that at a high level later on. You know, guys, we've grown over time. We've grown assets at a pretty high clip. Part of that is investment performance. And frankly, as you see in the circle, protecting our investors in tougher times in the market as well. Part of that is gathering new assets from existing clients and welcoming new clients into the fold. Really, really excited to be a part of their, you know, goals and plans for building and protecting financial wealth. And so happy to be a part of that. Anything you'd like to add and talk about the business before we move into the keys, guys? It's just like almost surreal for me to look at these kind of charts because I joined the firm in 2017 when we were, you know, under 200 million in management. And we've grown in so many ways, like the assets is a part of it. And that's what you're looking at now. But from offering more strategies to enhancing our wealth planning capabilities to getting into alternative funds. And it's just it's really been a neat thing to be part of that growth. I think I think one overarching dynamic that that this this graph kind of addresses. And one thing that I'm really proud of is the fact that when we do see extreme bouts of market volatility, I would argue it's when our firm really shines in terms of relative outperformance, in terms of capital preservation, as evidenced by year 2022. And you can see kind of the notes there and what happened in 2022. I'm sure you all remember equity indices were down significantly. Even bonds were down significantly. But also in 2020. Right. We had a we had a global global health crisis. And it turned out to be one of the one of the most fruitful years of SAM's existence. So really, we're really proud of that, that that dynamic. I agree. You know, we're already having some clients or some questions roll in as I look at the live questions here about some of these things. And so I'll be excited to expand more on kind of what we do that sets us apart as an investment manager and a wealth manager. I think so many investment firms don't do both of those well. And so I'll hit those and kind of how we've grown, how our strategies have done. Talk about those 10 different strategies. We're going to hit on some of those points. But without further ado, let's get to these six things. These six key steps, starting with number one. I'll start with this one. And that is AI. Artificial intelligence was a big topic of conversation in 2025. We think it's mission critical to understand artificial intelligence and its impact on the economy, on markets as we go forward. We kind of have put this as a this or that question. But really, it is, you know, the question is, does artificial intelligence satisfy the the incredible exponential opportunity and and hype that that some people have for it in terms of, you know, changing our lives, but really also becoming this this great engine for for productive growth for our economy and our businesses? Or does it create a risk because of various factors? Before I get into my slides on it, just curious, you know, to get your guys take on this and conversations that you've had with clients and businesses and business leaders? Kind of what do you think? Where do you think? Where do you sit? Or or maybe I'd ask kind of where do you think the current narrative is for among business leaders? I'll tell you from my own perspective, like when when the initial AI hype kind of just started, you know, hitting the the proverbial headlines, I was I was skeptical, as I am about a lot of things. And, you know, I kind of hopped on to chat GPT played around with it, wasn't terribly impressed since that time, both in listening to obviously, you know, countless earnings calls, as we do in hearing from from from enterprises, but then also in my own personal use and getting back at it and and finding ways to use it and incorporate it into my day and and how to be more efficient with it. Like I'm I would say I'm quite sold on the idea that this is important and in businesses are going to have to find ways to use it to remain competitive. That doesn't mean it's necessarily a great investment. So that's that's kind of what I'm curious to hear more about and and hopefully parse out through through the conversation here is, you know, business risk or opportunity. I think the answer is yes. You know, it's going to be it's going to be both. And so how to play that, I think, is is the important question there. Yeah, I think I think for me, I'm always keen to hear about anecdotes related to adoption, right, customer adoption. And Michael nailed it, right? We listen to so many earnings calls over the year. And it's great to kind of hear management teams talk about whether or not they're selling AI tools or whether they're buying AI tools. And the takeaway for me after the last two and a half, three years. And I and I think this is, you know, it's a generalization. I think it's true is that largely speaking, this AI technology is a cost reduction tool for many clients and customers. Right. Right. And you can you can argue about, you know, to what extent it actually reduces costs for a lot, a lot of larger firms. There's there's great anecdotes about how much they've spent and how much they've saved year over year. And I don't think that's going to go away. I don't think this is a this is a fad. I think this is a secular trend that will obviously continue for the foreseeable future, because ultimately corporations want to cut costs. And now, ultimately, what are the ramifications? Right. Of AI implementation. We'll talk about that. Right. Going forward. But ultimately, I I think just by virtue of, you know, we're very early in terms of in terms of customer adoption, I think this has got a long way to go. I think that's right. Yeah, no, I agree with both what you said. I think it's it's a fascinating time. The market has pretty high expectations in terms of of enterprise values for some of these A.I. plays in terms of the move in the market. Pretty high expectations for what A.I. can deliver. And really, the question is, will it be able to keep markets happy and deliver at that level? Particularly one thing that you've noted, Mario, is this the first derivative or second derivative of growth here is slowing. So, in other words, even though we're having some massive levels of A.I. spend, the rate of change is likely to slow over the next couple of years. And frankly, already probably is because it was starting for such a small base. And so we'll be grappling with that, I think, you know, even as we are still trying to figure out, will we have a strong return? Will businesses have a strong return on investment? Will also be grappling with, you know, are they investing less because of that weaker R.O.I. or because they can't finance more? So it's a really interesting, fascinating thing to be focused on. And we are laser focused on it. Let's get into sort of some of the things. And this first slide is really just a, you know, one attempt at taking a look at, you know, sizing this up. You've probably seen data on the left before our audience has. But, you know, almost four hundred billion dollars in capital investment deployed, CapEx investment deployed from just four companies in A.I. spending. That is a huge amount of spending. And, you know, Gartner, the Gartner Group, which does IT consulting and checking basically the entire industry, expects within IT markets, including, broadly speaking, businesses, other corporations investing in IT, that the spend was one point four trillion for 2025 and expects that to be to surpass two trillion this year. So there again, actual dollar investment is increased each year. But the rate of change is actually, you know, predicting slightly smaller. Still huge, huge numbers. I think let's go to this next one. And we started to articulate this a little bit. But in my mind, the main bear case for being concerned about A.I. kind of comes down to these four things. This is both for A.I. in general and also for A.I. investing. The first one is sort of the Terminator fear that that really it's not just an existential business threat, but it's an existential life threat. I don't think this should be top of mind for us right now. However, we probably have seen some of the data that suggests, you know, that there are reasons for caution on this vector. I think, you know, so worth following this piece, but not not my at least my top concern. I think for many folks, it's number two is probably the biggest concern that, you know, given your point, Mario, where many people are deploying A.I. for productivity gains. Do those productivity gains lead to more investment or do they just lead to fewer jobs and doing more with less? And I think, you know, we will talk more about this, but it's that's a very reasonable concern and one that we're focused on making sure that, you know, I think for this story to work, it has to be more the former where productivity gains lead to greater investment. We addressed this a little bit on the previous slide. Does slowing A.I. investment sort of weaken the overall investment case for some of those ancillary picks and shovels plays like HVAC, like power and energy, like data center build outs, etc. We're looking through this to date, the ROI returns on investment that that some businesses have talked about are quite high. But, you know, I think that there's other there's definitely reasons to be skeptical here. So we're watching that. I think the final thing is that those those companies, many of those A.I. darlings that have worked so well, frankly, are expensive, you know, to to pick on one. Palantir trades that, you know, hundred, you know, three digit multiple of its revenues, let alone its earnings or something else. So, you know, that's a challenge for us as we look at the at the market. Here's the offsetting bull case. And then I'll ask you guys for some thoughts. I think right now we're looking at A.I. more in in controlled general purpose technology settings where the the A.I. taking over is not is not a concern for the most part. As it relates to jobs, the precedence has been absolutely dislocation and friction from new technologies over time. But the historical precedent is that those productivity enhancements ultimately lead to new jobs. I think that's where we're landing for the most part, being very, you know, watching this whole thing play out. But for the most part, we're seeing greater investment in those companies that are finding productivity gains from from A.I. versus versus less investment or even flat investment. And then I that that that is that is key to our investment thesis. This third point is that if we do not see A.I. leading to productivity gains, driving corporate growth, earnings growth and GDP growth, then we're going to change our minds. But for now, the data suggests pretty significant productivity gains in a lot of the cases that we've looked. And then finally, on the last point, I think it is prudent to start thinking about, in some cases, moving from those picks and shovels plays from those arms dealers to the actual adopters of the technology. Those world class businesses that are making their business, their their enterprise even more efficient and even better by embracing and adopting the benefits from from A.I. So before I go to the next one, I want to get your thoughts there, guys. You know, there's so much, there's so much here, Austin, we can talk about. We can have a whole webinar on this slide, frankly. But in the interest of time, you know, one thing I'll say about one of the items in the bear case, the massive job losses as someone who sits in the San Francisco Bay Area. I've seen this firsthand where, you know, a lot of contemporaries are consultants, a lot of contemporaries are engineers, software engineers, and they've been on the front lines in terms of being negatively impacted by job losses as a result of A.I. Now, that said, right, we are seeing a transition to other types of jobs being created as a result of A.I., right? And that and we're still kind of seeing that form. I think it's kind of early days. So people will have to learn how to retool themselves, reeducate themselves, et cetera. So that item on the bear case, I would argue probably is maybe red for now. But over time, I could certainly see that not being on the bear case, maybe one, two, three, four years down the road. And then on the bull case, as I think about, you know, A.I. and what it means for productivity gains, I think at the end of the day, I think about A.I. as being and we could argue about this, too, somewhat disinflationary. Right. Any presence of a new tech driving down costs was probably it's probably not going to lead to inflation. And so anything that's probably disinflationary in our current environment, in my mind, is a positive. So that's how I think about it as well going forward. Yeah, I agree with Mario on the jobs front. And I feel like. It may not be such a question of losses or gains, but sort of the evolution of what jobs look like, whether it's existing jobs and what those look like day to day or maybe even new industries that we haven't fathomed yet that are an offshoot from this. What I kind of honed in on was the A.I. investing and going back probably almost a couple of years ago now to Alphabet CEO and talking about all the the CapEx that would be involved in the A.I. build out. And the gist of what he said was, you know, it's a risk, but it's a bigger risk to not make the investment and fall behind. And Austin, all four of those companies that you highlighted on the previous slide are, you know, massive and immensely profitable companies that that can cut the checks for this. And will the spending slow? Almost by definition, it will, because, you know, it's you know, can't can't be massive growth in this type of spending forever. But as far as, you know, aggressively pulling away from the levels we're at now, it's it's kind of hard to imagine just because none of those companies are going to be the one that took their their foot off the pedal and and, you know, didn't get to where they needed to be while other ones ran ahead of them. So we'll see. But I think the case for it slowing meaningfully in the near to intermediate term is I think that's a low risk the way I'm seeing it. Yeah, I agree. But I think it's a it's a valid point to raise that these businesses and many of these companies, you know, just just looking at the at those four companies. Here, one of the hallmark, one of the investment hallmarks originally was these were asset light businesses. These were high return on invested capital, but low capital intensity businesses. And that's no longer the case, at least in the intermediate term. They still could be great investments so long as you generate strong returns on that capital. Think of Costco, for example. Costco invests a ton of money in its stores. But and so it's not asset light. It's asset heavy, but it generates a really strong return on that invested capital. So, again, that goes back to what we're talking about. We need to see the the A.I. generate strong returns and we are seeing that. But we're going about this. Eyes wide open and certainly not overweight the mag seven. And I think that's a prudent place to be focusing on the ones that we those make those companies that we like and like long term. So I don't want to get bogged down just on this first point, even though we think it's a super important one. But let me just hit sort of our takeaways here. There's a lot on this. But I think we're we're watching the whole, you know, landscape. But I do think it's fair to say that on net, we currently are bullish on A.I.'s impact on productivity, corporate earnings and GDP growth. Frankly, we need that for the market to do well. And I'll talk about that later. Having said that, we are wary of A.I. only or A.I. commodity investments. So think the memory companies that, you know, are selling a commoditized product. I won't pick on them by name, but I'll tell you one a couple of years ago had a nine percent negative gross margin and is going to have a 65 percent positive gross margin for selling effectively a commodity, but a commodity that's in high demand. I don't think that's a long term recipe for generating strong returns over time. So we're wary of those type of investments. We do think the growth matters in these businesses. We love owning quality growth. But again, so do those other three things. Profits, return on investment and the valuation of the company you own. I'll be real quick on this one, but it's important. Many, many investors have been selling software services businesses for fear that A.I. will eat their lunch. We have a contrarian take on those special SaaS businesses that provide or control or have domain expertise over client data, workflow and cybersecurity. Those types of SaaS businesses are mission critical. And we've actually seen instances of them being enhanced greatly by through A.I. deployment. And then finally, I just would say, look, we love owning world class, well run businesses first and foremost. If they have a strong A.I. component to that investment thesis. That's great. But that's not going to supplant the first piece. In other words, we'd love to, for example, own Coca-Cola with a world class business model and maybe a D minus A.I. story than owning a D minus business that has an A plus A.I. story. Great. Well, I wonder with that, in the interest of time, let me kick it over to you, Mario. Thanks, Austin. I appreciate it. I know we're at the halfway point thereabouts, so I don't want to rob anybody else of time. So I'll be as expeditious as I can with Key 2. So as an economics nerd and bond market watcher, I get really fascinated when I see inconsistencies kind of pop up in the bond market, fixed income market. And if we go to the next slide here, I want to highlight something that we saw kind of start about 16, 17 months ago. And it was somewhat of a mystery, right? It was a mystery because if you remember 17 months ago, Federal Reserve started cutting rates for the first time in a number of years. And as you can see on this graph, typically, right, typically when the Federal Reserve cuts rates, right, at the same time, you'll see yields, treasury yields declined as well, right? Makes sense. However, this was not the case. In fact, we saw the exact opposite. So if we go to the next slide, and you can kind of see, you know, September of 2024, Fed starting cutting rates. And then all of a sudden, at that moment, 10-year treasury yields started to spike. In fact, they went up 75, 100 basis points in almost a quarter, which is pretty significant. And the question is why, right? Why did rates in yields move in completely different directions, right? And I think it's important to kind of think about what was the bond market thinking, what was about the economy at that time kind of going forward. And at that time, I would argue, we would argue that bond market was probably very concerned about inflation, right, about Federal Reserve becoming too accommodative and leading to inflation that was above the neutral rate. And so you kind of saw, as a result, 10-year yields kind of spike through the first quarter of 2025. But over the last 9, 10, 11 months, you've kind of seen 10-year yields kind of trickle down a little bit, right? There's still nowhere near, right, where we were in late 2024. But there's still that concern. If you go to the next slide, right, I think one thing to highlight in terms of where we are today is the fact that the Federal Reserve is very much divided, right? So on this graph, you see three simple lines. You see the median, which is nice, and that's oftentimes kind of the number that's quoted when you read news articles about the Federal Reserve and where they think rates are going over the next 12, 24, 36 months. But what oftentimes you don't see, right, are the outliers in terms of where certain governors are on the high end versus the low end. And you see some very hawkish governors, right, as evidenced by the yellow line, and you see some very accommodative governors on the blue line. So Federal Reserve, very much not on the same page. And the takeaway from this slide, I think, is that it's very hard to rely on kind of guidance from the Federal Reserve, given that it's so divided, right? But there is one thing that's worth mentioning. And I think this is a key theme as we think about the economy in 2026, right? I think it's important to understand what is top of mind for the Federal Reserve, whether they're a hawk or whether they're accommodative. And I think this is very interesting in that across the board, Federal Reserve, very much concerned about stagflation, right? This idea that you're going to have rising unemployment and at the same time inflation going up, right? Top of mind for Federal Reserve officials. And I think, you know, I think that's a strong argument. I think it's a valid concern to have. But at the same time, I think, you know, we talked a little bit in the last five, 10 minutes about the impact of AI on jobs. And so far, we've seen kind of that negative effect, right, that productivity gains oftentimes will result in job losses. And you've seen that kind of the job numbers play out over the last 3, 6, 9, 12 months. But the bigger question in my mind, I think, is inflation. How do we see inflation playing out at least in 2026? And there's a few variables that I would point to that would say might be disinflationary, right? We talked about the adoption of AI arguably being disinflationary. But also another thing to think about, too, is, you know, the negative impacts of tariffs are dissipating, right? That's going away. So that's going to be a key driver in terms of lessening the impact of inflation going forward. But also I think the stagflation concerns also reflect kind of the fear that the Trump administration is probably getting a little bit too handsy with the Federal Reserve and monetary policy, right? And I think, you know, those of us who were around in the early 70s, particularly in 1972, I was not, Austin. But I'm sure you'll remember that we've seen this story before, right, where I think in the 72 election, Nixon asked Federal Chairman Burns to lower interest rates to kind of boost the economy. And that's what happened, right? The Chairman Burns accommodated Nixon. He lowered rates. And then kind of right after that, you had the Arab embargo and inflation kind of took off, right? So I think that's kind of the fear in the back of the mind of the Federal Reserve Board is that you're going to have the executive branch probably inserting themselves into an independent organization that's supposed to be making independent monetary policy. And this insertion could lead to inflation, right? So I think that's kind of what you're seeing going forward. You know, I'm not going to say this is necessarily a hot take from Sam. Maybe it's kind of a warmish take. But, you know, frankly, we're cautiously optimistic that inflation will kind of taper off, that you're not going to see this stagflation scenario going forward. And as a result, you're – and also other factors leading to, you know, governors becoming more accommodative due to political pressure. You're probably going to see the Federal Reserve probably be more accommodative than what's anticipated right now in 2026. So all of this to say that this kind of leads us to a cautiously optimistic outlook for 2026 as it pertains to the economy and as it pertains to stocks. Obviously, you know, we can talk about the segments of stocks that we think are – have value and don't have value. But that's how we kind of see 2026 playing out as it relates to the bond market and as it relates to the economy. Also, I'll stop right there. I know I went a few – probably a few minutes over, Austin. And let me open it up to you because I know you probably have a few comments. Yeah, no, I would say, Mario, we've talked about this. We have an investment committee meeting every week and the three of us, you know, talk every day, frankly. And my take on this is, gosh, there's a lot of focus on the Fed and where rates are going next. For me, it's far more important why we're lowering rates than if we lower rates. So in other words, if we are lowering them because businesses are – inflation is going the right way and we're not – and that's the main focus, that's great. That's all systems go for our investments and market outlook. If we're lowering because we're worried that there really is an upside risk to unemployment and the economy is struggling because rates are too high, that is a reason for pause. And so we've discussed that. But I think that's – it's important. As important as where rates go is why they're going there. I think that's such a key takeaway. I don't want to dilute it with any additional thoughts. I think, frankly, that's it. Folks tend to zero in on the path of rates. But really, it's the why that is going to determine market reaction. So well said, I think. Good. Let's keep rolling. Michael, I think this is you. Yeah. And this is the part of the presentation where we kind of move from what everybody has kind of got top of mind to what's not being talked about at all or not being talked about enough. And if you're an econ nerd like Mario self-proclaimed himself to be, you might scratch your head a little bit when you see that we're talking about the bifurcation in the economy because that, at least among economic followers, has been discussed plenty over the last years, last couple of years. And I probably said bifurcation more in the last 12 months than at any other point in my life. And that's referring to the K-shaped economy, which we'll touch on here. But the reason that we have this planted in the not being talked about section is we think there's other important bifurcations, not only, frankly, more important than this K-shaped economy that I'll touch on, but even more impactful for the market because they're being avoided or ignored. So before we get there, the one that is kind of out there already and is being talked about is this idea of the K-shaped economy. And you can think of this as essentially some participants in the economy are having a different experience than others. Some are doing well, some not so much. And you can portray this in different ways. What we're looking at on this chart is that that line kind of down the middle, the spine of the K, if you will, is the recessionary period during COVID back in March of 2020. What happened from there is where we get the divergence. So the green line that we're looking at that's more or less up and to the right is the S&P 500. The other line, the blue line that's heading generally down is the consumer sentiment survey from the University of Michigan. So starting with the S&P 500, we're looking at stocks here, but really you could have thrown in house prices, Bitcoin, gold, all sorts of different assets. The point is, if you own assets over the last five years or so, you're probably pretty happy. They've appreciated quite a bit. Who owns assets tends to be folks that are well off, that are able to invest. And that's why you get this sort of divergence between for some folks are pretty happy with the direction of things. Others are feeling kind of pessimistic. And the consumer sentiment level has not recovered back to where it was before COVID. And that's because a lot of people are not doing that great. There's a big swath of the economy that is, they have it hard right now. Interest rates are higher. There was a lot of inflation that raised the price of goods and services that disproportionately impacts folks of lower income, the type of folks that don't own as much assets. And so we've got this divergence, the K-shaped economy, if you will. A lot of people have kind of sounded the alarm bell about this. And you kind of see it show up in some economic stats like subprime auto loan delinquencies and things like that. And it's sort of portrayed that this could be a canary in a coal mine. I don't think that's accurate by itself. And I'll tell you why. And this might sound, frankly, a little bit like, I don't know, hopefully not too mean or cold hearted. It's not meant to be. It's just sort of the world that we live in. Many of you have heard that the United States is a consumption driven economy. About 70% of our GDP comes from, it's really a big consumption. High and middle income folks are responsible for 88% of that consumption. The lower income folks, you know, almost kind of by definition, they're tapped out. They aren't contributing to the economy as much. Do they matter to the economy? Sure, absolutely. And in some industries and some specific companies, you know, more than others. But my point is that as long as other parts of the economy, and we have a very diverse economy, as long as other parts are doing well enough to offset that, for example, the AI spending that we just talked about, it is certainly possible that the economy can keep chugging along as the stock market has done for more than three years now. While folks are still, you know, pessimistic about the economy and frankly, having a hard time of it. So, almost verged into a little bit of a hot take there. That's a bonus for you, I guess, if you will. But what we really wanted to touch on in this section is other bifurcations in the economy. And again, we think these are, frankly, more important for your investment results and potentially more impactful because they're not getting as much attention in some cases. So, just to roll down the list, AI, now that's obviously one that is being talked about, but we think maybe not quite in the same way that we're looking at it. There's going to be beneficiaries. There's going to be companies that are more threatened. The market's not always going to get that right. And Austin kind of alluded to the software as a service companies as an example to where, you know, the market is having its reactions. We think you need to double click into that. And there are going to be companies that are threatened and their stock prices are going to, you know, get beat up. Their businesses might get in trouble. There's going to be some opportunities there as well where maybe it's not such a threat. It's an opportunity that the market's missing. Balance sheets. You know, if we run into a weaker economy, it's going to be a really important thing to have companies with a strong balance sheet that aren't levered with a bunch of debt. Reason being, their companies are going to be more resilient. Their sales slow down. You know, they aren't on the hook for a bunch of interest payments. And in a perfect world, they can use that weakness to, you know, grab market share, maybe buy out competitors because they have that strong balance sheet. What happens if we have a stronger economy? You still want to own companies with strong balance sheets. For that scenario, companies with strong balance sheets are going to be able to grow their business. They're launching new products. They're opening stores. And so it's always a good idea in our view to own companies with strong balance sheets. Now, if you are one of those companies and you're investing, do you want a high return or a low return? Pretty easy one, right? But in our view, this gets overlooked a lot. A lot of times investors kind of hone in on a few metrics that are most important to them. Maybe it's PE ratio. Maybe it's dividend yield. Those are important too. But there's a lot of different things to look at when you're analyzing a company. This is one that we think is understated. So why is this so important? When you have high returns on investment, you're able to compound your earnings growth faster. And over the long term, stock price and earnings growth tend to go in the same direction. For owning stocks, I'm going in the right direction. And historically, high return on investment stocks have done exceedingly well. Next one, price maker, price taker. This is important, certainly in an inflationary environment. It means that you have more resiliency if there's a lot of inflation because you can raise your prices. But frankly, even if we don't hit a particularly high inflationary environment, this is still important. It's a great sort of like cheat sheet way to discover companies that Warren Buffett referred to as having a strong moat around the business. And it happens for different reasons. It might be a strong brand. It might be valuable intellectual property. Maybe there's high costs to leave so their customers are really sticky. Maybe they sell an addictive product. Whatever it is, if you are a price maker, there's a good chance that you also have a moat around your business that's going to insulate you from competition in the years ahead. And then finally, administration friendly or not, whether you like it or not, the administration is definitely having an impact on certain companies and certain industries in the stock market. And it makes sense to be on the right side of that. And it seems like there's a new example of this every day. But the one that I would point out that I think highlights both the risk and the opportunity in all this is defense contractors. And if you rewind to last Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order in efforts to prevent defense contractors from issuing dividends and buying back stock. And the market didn't like that. And frankly, I didn't like it either. I manage our income portfolio and I really like those dividends and buybacks. So there was a bad reaction that day. The very next day, he put out plans to increase the defense budget to $1.5 trillion in 2027. That's over a 50% jump from where we are today. And as you might guess, the market liked that and defense stocks took off. So where do we land on that? And this is part of active management, right? We're assessing what's more important. What does it mean short term, long term? Which idea is most likely to go through? Which one is going to get watered down? So it makes for a bit of volatility to be sure, but also can be a nice opportunity when you're on the right side of this. Great. Mario? So this is the one I accidentally alluded to, Austin. And I'll be as expeditious as I can. So I want to begin by saying I'm in no means a tax professional, nor am I a tax guru like a lot of our wealth managers here at the firm who certainly know this a lot better than myself. But I wanted to talk about a few things that are new in 2026 that are certainly worth highlighting and to keep an eye on. Right? So the first one is kind of big changes to the laws regarding estate and wealth. Right? Big one, the estate tax, gift tax exemption rising to $15 million per individual, $30 million per couple. And the big change there, right, is it's permanent. Right? There's no risk of it being sunsetted. versus the prior estate tax exemption created out of the Tax Cut and Job Act of 2017 was supposed to sunset in 2025. So the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in July of last year took care of this. So now we're going to see $15 million going forward indexed for inflation. The next one, and this is certainly, I would probably argue, even more important to understand and know, is kind of this new change or dynamic governing qualified small business stock. And specifically, you've got these new shorter holder periods, holding periods. Right? So before this kind of new law took into effect, you had to hold qualified small business stock for at least five years. Right? To gain kind of this exclusion from Fed tax. Now, right now, OBBBA is introducing this new shorter holding period for folks where you can, you know, choose to liquidate stock after three years, after four years, et cetera. So it provides much better flexibility to holders of qualified small business stock. And ultimately, at the end of the day, makes investing in qualified small businesses like C-Corps that much more appealing. Right? And for those of you who are living kind of in coastal states or in high Midwest tax states, this will probably resonate with you. Right? So you've got the state and local tax deduction limit rising to $40,000. Right? From $10,000. Pretty significant. But it starts to scale down if your modified adjusted gross income is over $500,000. And then goes down to $10,000 after $600,000. Right? So as an individual or even a couple, it behooves yourself to really stay under this $600,000 threshold or even $500,000 if possible. And because the tax savings could be pretty significant. The second point, the second point I think about this is just free money. And for those of you who don't know about the PTAT, the pass through entity tax. Right? So this is something where if you're a shareholder of an LLC or if you belong to an S-Corp, right? You can have your federal taxes paid out of the business and thus reducing your taxable income. And, you know, to the extent that you could do that, that's material tax savings. Right? Again, just a gimme. And if you haven't done it already, I encourage you, or if you're unfamiliar with this concept, I encourage you, if you are a client at SAM, to please work with our wealth managers to kind of unlock that PTAT dynamic with your taxes. And then finally, this is kind of a, this one kind of annoys me a little bit, quite frankly. This kind of came out of Secure 2.0, which was signed in 2022 under the Biden administration. But now employees that are aged over 50 years old who earn more than $150,000 can no longer make catch-up contributions into pre-tax traditional 401ks. You have to do it in a post-tax Roth. And so it kind of, in my mind, kind of changes an individual's thinking about whether or not that's appropriate, given whatever tax bracket they're in. And again, if you're a client, it helps to have a wealth manager talk this out as a standing board and whether or not it makes sense for you, if you're somebody who falls in this category, to make catch-up contributions in a Roth 401k. These are not, all these dynamics I discussed are not exhaustive. There's still many more. But these are just simply the ones I wanted to highlight and bring to your attention. Again, please, if you're a client of SAM, work with our wealth managers. They'd love to talk with you ad nauseum about these concepts, about reducing and or deferring your taxes at the end of the day. Yeah, I think it's fantastic. I mean, I think, look, ultimately, my takeaway is taxes matter a lot. And to the extent that you can delay them, defer them, minimize them, that will ultimately improve your overall net worth position and the growth of your portfolios. This is a slide which kind of just very quickly discusses the process through which we kind of flush out the wealth management picture of our clients. This is kind of the wheel that our wealth managers kind of go through with each of our clients to help them understand their better overall picture with the goal of really positioning our portfolio strategies with the right mix to make sure that they meet our clients' investment objectives. Right. And it's an organism. It's constant. Right. It's always growing. These conversations never stop. Right. So to the extent that you can utilize our wealth managers to get a better understanding of this picture, please do so. Yep. And this slide is actually for our clients, too. We have many clients that focus more on our investment management services, but want to remind them that we have full wealth management financial planning services as well. Great. All right, Michael, let's go to this next one. Four down, two to go. Let's do it. This is probably the number one thing I've gotten questions about over the last year. So is gold going to keep going up? Should I own gold? Should I sell my gold? So let's talk about gold. I know it's on a lot of people's minds. And frankly, one of the big reasons why is what it's done lately. This is a chart looking at the last couple of years of gold spot price. It's more than doubled. When you get a chart like this, whether it's a stock or housing or Bitcoin or, in this case, gold, people tend to get pretty interested and they want to know, you know, is it too late if they weren't in or if they enjoyed this write-up? What should I do? I think it's important to take a look at the long-term performance of gold to get an idea how it behaves because, unfortunately, you know, it isn't just a straight shot up. The next chart is going back to 1974. And what you'll see in that chart is gold has periods where, just like it has done the last couple of years, big spikes up. And then, you know, long-term gold owners know this. It has periods, often years long, sometimes even decades, where it does very little or even declines. This is partly because it's, you know, driven by sentiment, which is unpredictable. It's also driven by central bank buying, which, you know, they don't tell people what they're going to do ahead of time. As a lot of folks know, central bank buying has been big in the driver that we've had so far. So why we think this is like kind of a hot take and people are thinking about gold the wrong way, at least in the conversations I have, a lot of people are thinking of it as either a short -term trade or a growth driver that's going to have, you know, this type of performance regularly. I hope it does. We have a gold strategy that we would love to see, you know, another year like last year. But that was the best year that gold's had since 1979. You know, it was an anomaly. Doesn't mean it can't happen again. But historically, it doesn't make sense to think of it the way you might with like a high-quality growth stock. We don't look at it that way. So we can move on to a couple of charts that will show you where we do think there's value. And it's really as a diversifier, as a capital preservation vehicle, and also as a chaos hedge. And it has a great track record in these moments of market volatility to either, you know, stay put, maintain where it's at and preserve that capital or in some cases even grow. And we just saw the tech bust. We're looking at the great financial crisis. Now blue line is the stocks. Red is gold. You can see which one you'd want to be. And then on the next one is the COVID crash. Also managed to stay fairly steady in an incredibly violent bear market for stocks. So, you know, we think it's great for this in the short term, longer term. If one of your goals is wealth preservation, we certainly like gold a lot better to do that for you than fiat currencies. We have a gold strategy, as I mentioned. We can take a look at the next slide, and it lets you know the kind of things we're investing in. And it ranges from the physical metals to major global mining companies, emerging producers that maybe are smaller but are growing, and also royalty companies, which, you know, don't really mine anything at all. But they fund the mines. They get royalty payments from the production. Some of the most capital efficient businesses on earth. We're big fans. This is an active strategy. So, you know, what we're invested in, it's not static. Last year, as an example, was a great year for miners. Long-term royalties have outperformed. And the dynamics that inform that change constantly. And so, you know, we're going to be invested likely in all of these to some degree. But what we favor, where we want to have more of our chips, so to speak, is going to depend on the sort of environment we're in. And the results, frankly, have been ones that we're very proud of. We've won another PSN Top Gun Award. We've won these for consecutive quarters. We won one for one-year return and also for the slide for a three-year return as well. And what this is, is PSN has a database of different managers and strategies. And to be considered a Top Gun, you have to be in the top 10 of their universe that they track. In this case, we were in the top five for three-year returns out of a universe of 2,651 strategies, to be precise. So, you're obviously thrilled with how it's done. It was a good year for gold in general last year. But, you know, certainly for the SAM gold strategy, we're thrilled with how it's done as well. So, do we think it's the ultimate growth vehicle for you? Probably not. But we do believe it fits into part of a strategic allocation. That's why we have 10 strategies. People have different goals, different preferences. In our view, a lot of time, gold makes sense for part of that. So, we can't give individual advice here. But generally speaking, I would say if you don't own any, it could make sense for you long-term to think about it. At the same time, if you're hoping that it's going to, you know, double again for the foreseeable future over and over again, I hope you're right. But, you know, might be a risky way to go about meeting your goals. So, this is part of the conversation that Mario spoke about when we're working with folks, figuring out what their goals are, what sort of plan they should have. The right strategic allocation is absolutely a part of that. We are bullish on gold. I will say that emphatically. It is a superior store of value to any fiat currency. So, when you look at gold measured in dollars or yen or euros, it will continue to go up and to the right. It will not be a straight line. It will highly unlikely be able to mimic the returns that we saw over the last year and six months, frankly, year after year. But we are bullish on gold. We are also bullish on owning world-class businesses that produce returns and dividends for you as an investor. So, I think the way we want to think about it is if you don't own any gold, you probably should own some. If you only own gold and expect the same type of returns that we experienced last year, we would temper that expectation and pull back to that middle. Look, our gold strategy, I'll just come out and say it generated well north of 100% last year. And I know a lot of folks did very well with it. We are optimistic, but also just want to caution folks that it's first and foremost priorities in your portfolio are value store chaos hedge, not necessarily going to double and double and double and double. But we'll take it when we get it. What's that? I said we'll take it when we get it. Yeah, but we'll take it when we get it. Yeah, absolutely. Good. All right. Let's keep rolling. We talked about owning gold or thinking about gold the right way. And I think I want folks to think about risk the right way. I think too often investors think about risks in two fashions. One, do I have enough positions to be diversified and sort of think sort of simply having a bunch of investments will save me? Or should I sell? Should I reduce risk by selling and sitting in cash? And, you know, while diversification does help to mitigate some risk, there are other ways and more sophisticated ways, frankly, that we think you shouldn't think about risk. The way that we're utilizing and thinking about risk management so that our investors can continue to generate strong returns. But ideally and throughout our history, dampening the drawdowns. You really want to avoid those drawdowns. They're taxing on an investor emotionally. And also they're just hard to recover from over the long term. And so I got three quick ways to think about risk. The first is correlation. So it's not OK to just be diversified across things. If they're highly correlated, that's not going to help. And why does correlation matter? One example is in 2022 when most folks thought they had diversified by being in a 60-40 portfolio, 60 percent equities, 40 percent bonds. And this chart simply shows that over that period, both did very poorly. And we can talk about in the Q&A why that is. And we've written about it. But you really want to lower the correlation across your portfolio. We do that in a number of ways. Mario is an expert in looking at merger arbitrage investments. And that's an example where there's idiosyncratic risk in that investment. Does the deal occur or not at the right price or not? But very rarely does that risk that you're taking that the deal happens have anything to do with the actual market. So we've seen many instances where our M&A, our merger ARB investments, are actually up on a down day in the market. We have other examples of ways that we reduce and lower correlation. Here's one that may be counterintuitive because you can reduce your equity correlation by owning another equity. And in this case, it's in financial exchanges. So financial exchanges are regulated monopoly and oligopolies that control much of the way we transact and the information in our financial world. The interesting thing is that the best of these financial exchanges actually increase the quality in the business and the volumes and profits of their business actually increase during market dislocation. So when volatility goes up and stock prices go down, the value of exchange businesses go up. And we've seen that do very good for our investments. An example of this type of low correlation investment is Intercontinental Exchange or ICE. They own 13 regulated exchanges and six clearinghouses across the globe, including the NYSE. If you know the ICE Brent crude oil price, that's them. Lots of different futures markets. They are the leader in energy prices, financial futures and options, including CDS and various different fixed income instruments. They have a couple of two different things that even make them more uncorrelated in our eyes. One is they have a large mortgage technology and software business. And actually, as rates decline, we would expect increase in mortgage volumes. And so we're just now starting to see that where one piece of their business actually can do well in lower rate environments. Many financial businesses don't do well in lower rate environments. This is one that does. So it's a nice hedge for that, even though, frankly, non-financial businesses do better in lower rate environments. ICE has made a huge investment in Polymarket. And that's a prediction market, one of the leading or the leading prediction market. We think that this only enhances their business, not only for the value of the investment itself and the ROI that they've gotten on that investment, but actually from the information that it could potentially provide to the other parts of their business. So we're really excited. It's an example of lowering your correlation, actually, by owning more of something versus just selling out. The next thing I want to talk about is we, by and large, want folks to stay invested at the core of their portfolio. But we are by no means a set it and forget it. Never look at your investments type of investment manager. In fact, those folks that are blindly setting and forgetting are really missing real opportunities to avoid investments that aren't any good in certain parts of the investment time horizon. So we believe investing is seasonal. There are times where you want to avoid certain investments and focus in on other ones. As an example, we didn't own a single bond. If you go back and see that chart as bonds were declining in price in 2022, we didn't own a single bond across any of our strategies in 2022 on behalf of our, at the start of 2022 on behalf of our clients. Because investing is seasonal. You know, another way that we can be nimble and make sure that we can take advantage of investing being seasonal is through quantitative analytics and quantitative risk management. Our tactical select strategy does just that. So we own, we start by inputting our favorite fundamental investment ideas across all our strategies in tactical select. Then we utilize quantitative systems, including some that you might be familiar with, like Tradesmith or Chaken Analytics, as well as our own proprietary tools to harness and analyze kind of what we view as the best of both worlds. And really making sure that not only are we owning the right things, but it's the right time to own those investments. Returns have been very strong over the life of this. We're excited to talk more about that. We're actually gonna have a dedicated investment webinar on tactical select next month. All right, Michael? Yep. That's the plan. Good, good. Then finally, the last piece of this one is you can stay more fully invested if you focus on Northwest quadrant investing. And what do I mean by that? Well, if you think about this blank chart that has volatility across the X axis and annual returns across the Y axis, where you want to be is the upper left. The extent that you can lower your drawdowns, lower your volatility, increase your annual returns. And over time, you know, historically, folks have said there's kind of really just one way to do this. You kind of just change your mix of publicly traded debt and equity. And that's really what this bottom line shows. If I have a certain mix of equities versus fixed income, then I can have more return, but I'll have more volatility along with it. You know, this is our hot take is that there are alternative investments that maybe are not in favor right now, like private credit, that really can do this for investors. It's not going to be right for all investors, but for many investors owning private and alternative investments, expanding your investment universe beyond just the 2500 stocks that are companies that are publicly traded, you know, is mission critical to being able to actually do that. holy grail of getting more in that northwest quadrant where we're raising our returns, even at lower levels of volatility. For those of you who are interested in learning more about what we're doing in alternative investments and particularly why we like private credit and why we like real estate related private credit. I'd encourage you to put something in the question box now and say I'd like to learn more about that. This is for accredited investors only. So you have to have a million dollars of net worth and beyond for really doing it the right way. But definitely would encourage you to put your hand up and say I'd like to learn more and we'll be happy to talk more about that. Again, this is where we think consensus is wrong. Consensus is concerned. And there's been some Mario and I've talked about it on other, you know, white papers and webinars that, you know, kind of private credit is getting a bad rap. But if you can be up the capital structure and provide really mission critical strategic capital, it can be a great risk adjusted source of returns where you can generate equity like returns at lower levels of risk. So very happy to talk more about those those opportunities that we see going forward. Look, I want to I want to hit these final takeaways. Allow me to do this and then we'll hit some questions. OK, so A.I. is the top story for the markets, the economy in 2026. We think rightfully so. But if that job picture holds steady, if that if we're not losing jobs, then we are bullish broadly on well run companies that are A.I. adopters. And then also the overall market. It's that important, the overall market to the Mario talked about, you know, all eyes are on the path of interest rates and the Fed stagflation outlook. Will that occur again? We think more important than if Fed cuts rates is why they cut rates. And ideally, they're cutting them because inflation is tamed. There's a bifurcation of the economy, but that extends well beyond just those that have high and low incomes. We want to own the top of the K attributes and avoid the rest as we as we look into 2026 and beyond. Taxes matter to your wealth far more than most investors realize. Find ways to delay and reduce those taxes and look, reach out to us. We can be of help. Think about gold the right way. We love gold, but own it first and foremost as a crisis hedge and value store. And remember that 2025 gains are not normal, but we love gold. Finally, let's think about risk the right way. Correlations matter. Investing is seasonal and actually private credit is actually a good, good investment for many investors. And again, we want to work with you to make sure it's suitable for you. We want to we've got already got a bunch of great questions. We're going to take we're going to go for 15 minutes and hit some of these. If we don't get to yours, we're going to follow up and look forward to doing that because there's some really great questions here. I want to start all the way down. And we, you know, asked the first question was Michael should folks be taking profits in gold and silver? And we got a bunch of gold questions. You know, look, some people are wondering if the continued high demand will continue. And others are saying, look, folks like Porter Stansberry or Jim Rickards are thinking that this this bull run in gold and silver is going to continue for many years from here. What are your thoughts? Should I take profits as, you know, an individual kind of conversation? But, you know, again, if. If. You had a thoughtful allocation and figured out that five percent was a good number for you, if for gold and silver and all of a sudden it's 10 percent, you know, maybe it makes sense to take a bit off the table there from a risk management perspective. Conversely, if you don't own any, I wouldn't necessarily be. Deterred by the run up that it's had, because frankly, I didn't want to get to into the gold dynamics and turn it into a gold webinar, but when gold rallies, it can last a while. And if you know, if it stopped this year, this would be a relatively short gold bull market historically. So, you know, not saying at all that, you know, all the returns have been had, but it's really an individual thing. I know Porter is bullish. I know he loves the royalty space, particularly, as do I. I follow Jim Rickards, too. I got a Jim Rickards gold book, you know, right on my bookshelf there. I think it was published in 2010 and he was, you know, just as optimistic then. And now he's, you know, it's heading in the right direction for him. Does it go to 20,000? I think someday. Yes. Does it do it this year? I'd probably take the other side of that. But I think it's fine to be, you know, optimistic about it and have it as part of your allocation. And frankly, I can see drivers that could send it soaring quite a bit from here as well. Maybe we get those. Maybe we don't. But, yeah, it's something that folks should be thinking about if they don't have it. Yeah. I think that's right. Yeah. We absolutely think it's for most investors. And again, it depends on your unique situation and would love to talk with you about that. But for most folks, gold is an important part of your overall portfolio, but shouldn't dominate that portfolio. It should be, portfolios should be dominated by productive assets that generate strong returns year in and year out and can grow, you know, dividends and earnings power for you for decades to come. So, Mara, I want to ask you this one. You know, one question we have is, you know, what sets us apart? What is from other financial advisors? You know, what is our team approach to success and how are we set apart from others? Oh, that's an easy one, Austin. Come on. Softball question. The easy answer is, look, I've been at SAM for a number of years, been involved with onboarding hundreds of clients as has Michael Joseph as well. And and I can say unequivocally, you know, 95 plus percent of them come from financial advisors where their portfolios are passively managed. Right. And they they might have some type of exotic structured note that they probably don't understand or maybe their advisor doesn't understand, but probably generates a lot of fees for their old advisor. We do not passively manage, nor do we purchase those types of structured exotic vehicles as well. We we actively manage portfolios security by security, asset class by asset class. A lot of you a lot of you folks are aggressively manage your own portfolios. You're self-managed. You're you understand the markets. You love to get into the weeds of particular sectors of particular companies. And that's what we love to do as well. Right. And so if you're looking for a place that has that same type of philosophy, active management philosophy, that is how we differentiate ourselves from other financial advisors. I think that's right. And then and then marrying it with world class, holistic wealth management services as well, that both are important. And as a client, our clients get access to a dedicated wealth manager and then they have us and our team hammering the investments and making sure that your dollars are invested the right way day in and day out. I think that's right. To try to catch a bunch of these questions together, I would say, hey, and I did. We did not compare notes, but I did ask you guys. This wasn't necessarily meant to be an exhaustive list. This was meant to be six things we thought were really important to the market. But what would be one that we didn't mention that you'd have? And I'll welcome you guys both to go first. I'll just I'll go first just because, you know, one large vertical of which we didn't address. And I think probably purposefully so because it require another webinar are geopolitical variables in 2026. Right. I certainly did not have on my bingo card the United States taking over, you know, a South American country in the middle of the night. So I think we as an investment committee are going to be very vigilant in terms of monetary and geopolitical activity going in 2026 and thinking about the ramifications of said geopolitical activity going forward. I mean, we just had that conversation today. In fact, that is an investment committee. And there's no means of solidifying an answer, you know, right away. These answers typically are fully formed after hours or days or weeks to discussions. But nonetheless, it's always top of mind for us. That's a great one. Yeah, I totally agree. Michael, what do you say? I have an outlier key for you, which I don't think it's necessarily going to be a driver in 2026. But if it kind of takes shape, then I can see it maybe being a top story. And it's kind of kind of timely now, too. I'm referring to the idea of Fed dependence. And for anyone that missed it, Chairman Powell put out a video on Sunday saying that he was being and the Fed was being investigated regarding this renovation they're doing for their D.C. headquarters. It's been like a multi year project. And President Trump is kind of criticized at being over budget and things like that. But this is, you know, this is kind of an escalation and a big leap, in my opinion, from, you know, maybe having a project that went over budget to saying that somebody had criminal intent in what they were doing. And it kind of and he was clear on the video saying that he felt it was, you know, basically a punishment or a threat for not falling in line with the president's preferred interest rate path. So it kind of brought up this idea of Fed dependence. And that'll certainly be something to monitor when we get a new Fed chair. Again, it's it's not the thing that's keeping me up at night. And I would probably fall on the side of like, I think it'll blow over and not be a thing. But it also seems to me one of those items where we could wake up one day and the market has decided that this is a big problem. And that could do a lot to a lot of different markets. And just off the top of my head, I'd expect a weaker dollar. I'd expect it to be bad for bonds and bond proxies like utilities. I'd expect gold to do really good. So, you know, we might eat our words and have another huge, you know, year for gold if it happens. And, you know, equity markets mixed. You know, we could go on and on. But again, not keeping me up just yet, but could could imagine it being one of those outliers that that impacts things. Yeah, no, look, I think that's a good one as well. Ten different investors can debate on the importance or validity of the Fed. And it's critic, you know, whether we need one or not. But yeah, so let me just quickly throw mine in because I think it's worth acknowledging this. We really haven't outside of maybe mentioning some of the A.I. stocks being expensive. Look, valuations and expectations for growth are lofty right now. And so, you know, full stop. We need economic activity, GDP growth and earnings growth to meet or exceed expectations for this market to continue to push higher. I frankly think that, you know, we're you know, we're cautiously optimistic that that is the path that we're going on. But just want to make sure to say that emphatically, that we're not going to sell because things are expensive, but we may sell expensive things. If we see earnings power and productivity and GDP growth not coming in the way that the market is expecting. So that's it. That's an important thing that we'll be focused on. I wanted just that hits on another question that I'll answer real quick, which is, you know, this is a we have a viewer that says, look, many advisors will commonly say they revisit or change their guidance or their portfolio. If things change significantly, what type of things are we looking for? You know, is it more macro? Is it more fundamentals? And what I would say is we at a high level, we tend to monitor our portfolios daily, hourly, et cetera, with a long term lens. But being nimble, if and when three things happen, we tend to sell when one of three things happen. One, if the investment thesis changes. Now, that could be, you know, the micro, the fundamentals where, gosh, maybe we were wrong or maybe the business changed or it could be macro factors that make that investment thesis less good or just just not prudent to be owned. Two, we'll sell for risk management purposes. Many cases, an investment has gotten so large that for risk management or risk factors, we're focused on a lot of risk factors across our portfolios. It's prudent to reduce that risk. It could also be we're reducing overall risk exposures. Again, if we're starting to worry about growth, for example, in the market. And then three, if we have a higher and better use for that capital. So we want to own the world's best businesses. And we have a strategy, for example, called the forever strategy that so long as we continue to believe that these businesses will be tomorrow's best businesses, we will hold them essentially forever. But we also want to be mindful and make sure that these three cell disciplines are still intact for us. And so I think that's important. And the question is a good one. We do have tangible answers to that. And some folks do not. I think we've got time for maybe, you know, one or two more questions. Let me ask, Michael, as our what do you are, maybe our value investor on the team, maybe, you know, you focus on in part running the income strategy. What do you think of value investments for 2026? They do. It's been a tough time to be a value investor. They just haven't gotten the attention that a lot of these, like, growthier areas have. That actually started to change a bit in Q4. And, you know, like, outlook for value, I think it just said the easy answer is it depends. There's, you know, there's value stocks that are cheap for a reason, melting ice cubes. And there's ones that are just overlooked and will have their day. I think in the latter camp, health care might be in there. And we started to see those kind of rally in Q4. And that's an area that we've been looking at that's clearly important and also historically cheap. So, yeah, value always matters. Depends on the company. Unfortunately, a lot of those value stocks are also ones that have, for example, poor balance sheets and are highly levered. And we talked about the importance of having those good balance sheets. So, sometimes it's a little bit needle in the haystack. But, you know, for fellow value investors, I'd say don't give up. Find good businesses. I always approach, you know, long-term investing as we're owning part of a business. And there's going to be times when it's in favor and times that it's not. But if it's a high-quality, healthy business, that's interesting to us. Great. And then last one for you, Mario, since you, you know, both do a lot of things for us, but you do focus a lot looking at fixed income and credit investments, both in the public bond market and then also on the private credit side. What's your outlook for fixed income investments in 2026? Well, first, what I'll say about private credit is I'm very excited about our private credit vehicles, specifically the managers that we selected. We spent a lot of time distilling and curating those managers in our vehicles for very specific reasons. So, I'm really excited to see how that, how those vehicles play out over the next five years. And again, we encourage you, if you're interested, to reach out for more information about those vehicles. And then finally, on the public side, I'm really excited to be a fixed income, be part of a fixed income portfolio management team, because I think there's pockets of value in the fixed income space that sometimes is ignored or overlooked. Right. And, you know, one vertical I'll quickly address is in the convertible space. Very, very quickly, convertible bonds are hybrid instruments that have both fixed income and equity like characteristics. And we've found tremendous value, deep pockets of value in this when convertibles become busted. In other words, when they lose our equity sensitivity. And the reason why there's value there is because hedge funds kind of lose their interest in those types of securities because equity sensitivity wanes. But then also a lot of these convertible bonds are not rated by the agencies like Standard & Poor's and Moody's. And so that really institutions like life insurance companies, pensions, endowments can't really purchase them. And so they become kind of like the redheaded stepchildren of the fixed income universe. And that's great for opportunistic buyers like ourselves who are always looking for value and are not kind of hindered by those types of purchasing dynamics. So, so again, really excited about being part of this private private credit team that has curated these managers, as well as being part of this public markets team, looking at different pockets of value within the public bond space as well. Super. Well, I thank you both for your dedication to our clients and hard work. I think we're doing, we have a good plan for 2026 and beyond. Gentlemen, thank you for being here and thanks everyone at home. Have a great rest of your day. Bye everyone. Thank you. See you.