Live Zoom recording...plus a word from our founder
As promised, HERE is the link to our live zoom session from Monday, January 13, 2025. For our subscribers, it is also available in our RESOURCES.
If you are one of the people that joined Sungarden YARP Portfolio, the Seeking Alpha investing group we launched last November, thank you!
If you are not yet a subscriber, here's what I'd like you to consider as these modern investment markets continue to evolve before our eyes. This is no typical "subscription service." It has never aimed to be. There are too many of those anyway. And at this stage of my career, I'm not interested in catering to the masses. I've never appealed to thousands of people, because my investing approach eschews many aspects of "conventional wisdom" since as time goes on, the veil has been lifted to expose a lot of that. I'm talking about investing "long-term" regardless of downside risk, 60/40 cookie-cutter asset allocation schemes, sensationalism and hype in ANY form, and lack of recognition of how markets now function.
Algorithmic trading giants, indexation of the markets, hedge fund influence, and the transition from a bond bull market to a likely bear market are at the core of what makes this both an opportunistic era, yet one that carries massive risk for those who do not recognize that the rules of engagement are changing rapidly. If you just read that and think it is hogwash, you are not a fit for our service. If you do understand what I'm alluding to, and are not 100% confident that you don't need an investing group and a thought-leader to interact with regularly, then maybe Sungarden YARP Portfolio is a consideration for you.
In the brief couple of months since Seeking Alpha recruited us to move our paid service there from its former home on this Substack platform, our investing group members have seen that we mean what we say. Our mission is to be a unique community of investment straight-talk, a collaborative group that meets live at least weekly, has an active online chat area, and delivers a steady stream not of information, but of actionable, insightful. differentiated investment research. Of course, none of this is personalized advice, because that's outside the scope of what we do. It is what I did for 27 years in my "former life" so our approach to this from an educational ,service and responsiveness standpoint is still a priority here, just in a research format instead of personal advisory.
That includes a live, daily look into my personal portfolio, that of a 60-year old, semi-retired Baby Boomer from New Jersey, who with his wife/business partner Dana, raised their 3 kids in South Florida the past 3 decades. If you were not aware, that's what SUNGARDEN represents: the move to the Sunshine State from the Garden State in 1997, that saw me transition from a brokerage employee to an independent investment advisor, fund manager and fiduciary. I retired from that role in 2020, at which point I turned my attention to providing my experience and risk management discipline to a broader audience.
I'm always willing to speak openly about what I'm thinking, in regards to the service and the markets. After all, I'm semi-retired, not a 40 year old guy trying to "sell my product" to anyone who will listen. This service is likely to attract a very homogenous audience, based on wealth, philosophy, and most of all humility in approaching this inanimate object, the financial markets. To that end, we grappled with how to price this service, and here's why.
When I was a fiduciary investment advisor, my client base were $1-5mm+ types and they paid an average of $25k a year for our "full service" which included discretionary management, trading of accounts, 24/7 access to us, performance reporting and all client service/ops assistance. We met in person or virtually 3-4x a year. We sold that business in 2020, but I signed a 10-year, no-cut contract with the buyer of the practice (a CFP, which I'm not) to continue providing all of my research and attend client calls when requested, in a non-advisory capacity. We are halfway through that arrangement, which has really zero to do with what we're doing at Sungarden YARP Portfolio.
In my "semi-retirement" I started to run the aforementioned research service on Substack where for $300 a month, people could follow my portfolio, move by move, with robust commentary and a weekly live Q&A session. No personalized advice of course.
We moved that service to Seeking Alpha in November of 2024, and while the annual price is $1,500, we ran a "legacy subscriber" 35% discount of $975 for 12 months, with no price increases in the future. That "special" pricing for the first set of subscribers ended a few weeks ago, so the $1,500 annual price ($125 a month) is now in force.
I tend to be one of the few subscription-based non-advice portfolio and research services that doesn't tank when the markets do. In fact, my history is often that I have a decent chance of making money nearly every year. So for that aspect of it, as opposed to those who chase big returns and are OK with big down periods (I am not), we think we have made this available at a VERY reasonable price at Seeking Alpha. Particularly because we split the fee with them.
So the choice is, as always, up to the self-directed investor. My late father, who taught me to chart stocks in 1980 when I was a geeky teenager in NJ (as opposed to geeky semi-retired fella now), was a DIY investor. He was never a Wall Street pro. He sure was proud that I made a career in the industry he loved, and I'm glad he lived to see that. Now my own son is making his way in a different part of the industry, and that makes Dana and me very proud.
We all reach the point in life where we want to give back. Or, as I like to say to any of the publishing and other business outlets that seek me out: "I just want to be useful and be paid fairly." We think we threaded that needle quite nicely with Seeking Alpha through Sungarden YARP Portfolio. And perhaps most significant at a moment in time when our world is spinning faster than ever, having an experienced hand to try to make sense of all of it is not a bad way to roll through 2025 and beyond. If that connects with you, I invite you to JOIN OUR INVESTING GROUP. If not, I simply thank you for reading this.