A foolish consistency is the hub goblin of little mind, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divine.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

A different drummer.

And now, coming to you from Dead Center on your dial, welcome to Risk Parity Radio, where we explore alternatives and asset allocations for the do-it-yourself investor.

Broadcasting to you now from the comfort of his easy chair, here is your host, Frank Vasquez.

Thank you, Mary, and welcome to Risk Parity Radio.

If you are new here and wonder what we are talking about, you may wish to go back and listen to some of the foundational episodes for this program.

And the basic foundational episodes are episodes 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9.

Yes, it is still in my memory, thanks.

We have also created an additional resource, a collection of additional foundational episodes and other popular episodes.

We have top men working on it right now.

Ooh.

Top men.

And you can find those on the episode guide page at www.riskparody radio.com.

Inconceivable.

All thanks to our friend Luke, our volunteer in Quebec.

We'd be helpless without him.

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Because other than him, it's just me and Marion here.

I'll give you the moon, Mary.

I'll take it.

We have no sponsors, we have no guests, and we have no expansion plans.

I don't think I'd like another job.

Over the years, our podcast has become very audienced focused, and I must say we do have the finest podcast audience available.

Really top drawer.

Along with a host named after a hot dog.

Lighten up Francis.

But now onward, episode 475.

Today on Risk Party Radio.

It's time for the grand unveiling of MONEY!

Which means we'll be doing our weekly portfolio reviews of the eight sample portfolios you can find at www.riskparty.com on the portfolios page for the last time this year, actually.

And it's got poof!

We'll do an annual one next week.

Poof!

And then maybe we'll contemplate 2026 with these new crystal balls I got for Christmas from my friend Bill.

This is the one that I tend to use more often.

I have a calcite ball, and I have a black obsidian one here.

Yes, in fact, there is a black obsidian one and a calcite one together.

I'm not sure which one I should be reading first.

Now the crystal ball has been used since ancient times.

It's used for scrying, healing, and meditation.

But I'm sure I'll probably be getting the same answers out of these ones as I do out of my older Magic 8 ball, which is generally this.

We don't know!

What do we know?

You don't know, I don't know, nobody knows.

But before we get to our weekly reviews, I'm intrigued by this.

How you say emails.

And first off.

First off, an email from Tyler.

The middle children of history, man.

No purpose or place.

We have no great war.

No great depression.

Our great war is a spiritual war.

Our great depression is our lives.

And Tyler Wrights.

Hello, Uncle Frank and Queen Mary.

I can't thank you enough for how much Risk Parity Radio has benefited my financial education.

Your cozy dive bar of wisdom has changed the way I approach investing more than any other resource.

I really respect that you aren't selling anything besides donations to a worthy cause.

It speaks volumes to your integrity and gives credence to your wisdom.

I got this inkling.

Here's how it would work.

You get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work, but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time, 20, sometimes 30 hours a week.

Oh, but I'm but I'm not done.

And then what they create, they give it away rather than sell it.

It's gonna be huge.

Please see the attached screenshot of my own donation to the Father McKenna Center for my fast pass to the front of the email line.

The best, Jerry.

The best.

Before I get to my questions, here's what you need to know.

In 2023, my father passed away unexpectedly from a stroke and left me a sizable Roth IRA.

Since inherited Roths have a 10-year drawdown period and I want to avoid sequence of returns risk as much as possible, it makes a lot of sense to invest this money in a risk parity portfolio.

I discovered risk parity style investing through your appearance on the Bigger Pockets Money podcast and then voraciously consumed your show this last summer.

Now the inheritance is invested in a golden ratio style portfolio with 42% stock split between large cap growth in FNILX and small cap value in VIOV, 20% long-term bonds in VGLT, 16% gold in IAU, 10% managed funds in DBMF, and 6% short-term bonds in SGOV.

My plan moving forward is to withdraw every month a portion of the portfolio equal to one over the number of months remaining in the drawdown period and then rebalance the remainder.

The withdrawal will be deposited into a taxable brokerage account where it will be invested in equities with 50% going to VTI, 25% VIOV, 15% to VNILX, and 10% to VXUS.

When the principal eventually grows large enough, I want to take a securities-backed line of credit out to fund another rental.

We currently have three units with plans for about three more to support our fire goals.

Now for my confession.

The percentages I quoted above in the inheritance exclude about 10% of the total, which is invested speculated into Tesla and Oklahoma options and a Bitcoin ETF.

I bought these prior to transitioning into a risk parity portfolio and couldn't let them go when I made the switch.

The Bitcoin is currently down for me, but the call options have done remarkably well so far.

Shake them up, shake them up, shake them up, shake them.

Okay, on to the questions.

One, should I include the call options in Bitcoin in the equities portion of my risk parity portfolio allocations?

My current plan is to eventually cash out of the call options close to the expiration date and reinvest that into the Golden Ratio portfolio.

The Oaklo call is due in January and the Tesla call in another year.

To avoid tax, I want to keep the Bitcoin in the inherited Roth just in case it goes to the moon.

Uh what?

It's gone.

It's all gone.

2.

What is your opinion of my drawdown strategy?

It's like one person should have.

At the time of writing, there is still well over seven years left in the drawdown period.

Am I leaving anything on the table by starting my monthly withdrawals now?

3.

For peace of mind, I have considered transitioning the personal brokerage to a risk parity style portfolio before I take out the securities backed line of credit.

Do you have any thoughts on this?

I don't plan on withdrawing from the account, but would sleep better knowing it is less volatile than a 100% equities portfolio.

4.

With a weakening dollar, I'm considering upping the portion of VXUS.

I know you don't have a crystal ball.

Haha, well now you do.

A really big one, yeah.

Which is huge.

But could you quickly speak to my equity allocations more generally?

5.

Lastly, I was wondering if you have any experience with being a limited partner.

If so, how would you think about incorporating these types of investments into a risk parity portfolio?

Thank you so much again for everything you and Mary do for the DIY investment community and the Father McKenna Center.

I submit to your wisdom and bow to my sensei.

Kind regards, Tyler.

Bow to your sensei.

Bow to your sensei.

Well, first off, sorry for the loss of your father.

I know it's been a few years, but particularly when somebody dies unexpectedly like that, it kind of leaves a mark that you never quite get over.

I had a brother who died of a stroke at age fifty-eight, and that was about eight years ago now.

But it still makes you think and recognize that it could happen to almost any of us, or something like that could happen to almost any of us.

And as we age, it gets a lot more likely than running out of money or things like that.

So you have my condolences.

Second off, thank you for being a donor to the Father McKenna Center.

As most of you know, we do not have any sponsors on this podcast.

We do have a charity we support.

It's called the Father McKenna Center, and it supports hungry and homeless people in Washington, D.C.

Full disclosure, I am the board of the charity and I'm the current treasurer.

But if you give to the charity, you get to go to the front of our email line.

You can do that in two ways.

Either do it as Tyler has done here by going directly to the Father McKenna website and donating there, or you can become one of our patrons on Patreon, which you do in the support page at www.riskparty.com.

Either way entitles you to go to the front of the email line, but please do mention it in your email so I can duly move you to the front of the line.

Yes!

And we only have a few days left this year, so if you want that tax deduction this year, it's time.

Time is money, boy!

But now getting to your email.

We got five questions here.

Tyler's trying to get his money's worth.

Time is money, boy!

So your first one is to whether to include these call options in Bitcoin in the equity portion of your risk parity portfolio allocations.

Surely you can't be serious.

I am serious.

And don't call me Shirley.

And I have two minds on that.

Yes, you can do that.

And if you do that, they would go with your large cap growth stocks essentially, because they are highly correlated with large cap growth funds.

And that's generally how you categorize things because you're most interested in its correlation, how it plays with everything else.

So things that are highly correlated, you'd group together.

Inconceivable.

I would also treat them as a leveraged position, which you're going to have to kind of figure out.

Because I don't know the nature of your holdings exactly and how to translate that, but options are a form of leverage or can be.

And Bitcoin behaves like a three times leveraged NASDAQ fund for the most part, although a lot worse than that recently.

And so if you include those, then you're going to have to change the other allocations to balance things out.

Which may augure for not including them simply because they are not going to be around that long, at least the call options.

One of them's going to expire in January and the other one's going the year after that.

That is actually not very long in terms of portfolio holding periods.

We usually think of holding things for decades and not months or years.

So you might just wait and cash those out and then reinsert them into the portfolio.

So on balance, I'd probably include anything you're going to hold long term with the portfolio, but not anything that's going to be a short-term play anyway.

And if you are going to continue to speculate in things like this, you might just keep this whole thing segregated just for psychological reasons.

You have a gambling problem.

And so you're not putting more into it if it goes south on you?

Well, you have a gambling problem.

I think you're correct that you do keep these sorts of things in your Roth as long as possible.

But we're also going to get to that in a second here.

Alright, second question.

What's my opinion of your drawdown strategy?

I'm assuming you're talking about taking the money out of your inherited Roth.

And my short answer is I think it's too complicated, or it doesn't need to be as complicated as you're making it.

Because honestly, having an inherited Roth like this is basically having a get out of tax-free card that lasts for 10 years.

And so honestly, you're better off leaving it all into the Roth as long as you can and exercising that get out of tax-free card, whether those gains come on capital gains or on distributed dividends and things, you're not paying any taxes on them as long as they're in the Roth.

But when they come out, then they start being treated as taxable investments.

And since you can hold the exact same thing inside the Roth as outside the Roth, there's no reason to bring them outside the Roth until you absolutely have to.

So regardless of what you invest things in, I would leave them in the Roth as long as you can.

Now I should caveat that with is that I have not looked at the rules for these recently.

They keep changing as far as I know as to whether you're supposed to take this out on an annual basis or you can take it all out at once.

I was assuming that you could hold it longer, but I could be wrong on that.

I'd rather not risk trying to give you tax advice one way or the other.

So if you feel like you need to withdraw it on the 10-year track every year, then you should go ahead and do that.

But you would probably leave the highest growth potential assets in the Roth as long as possible.

I am a little bit confused about the overall strategy though, because you've got this as a risk parity style portfolio in the Roth, and then it sounds like you're going to move to a 100% equity portfolio when it comes out of the Roth.

So I'm wondering why don't you just leave it in 100% equity in the Roth to begin with?

I'm not sure what you're thinking really is there.

It may be more psychologically satisfying to not take the risk of the Roth money going down, but in terms of financial growth, putting it more in stocks like you plan to when you bring it out actually makes more sense.

And in fact, if you're going to use it for some kind of intermediate term purchase of a rental or something, it actually probably makes the most sense to have it in the all-stock portfolio inside the Roth and then put it in the risk parity style portfolio when you bring it out, because what you're worried about then is it diving considerably while you're trying to fund this rental.

And one of the things you can use one of these kind of portfolios for is this kind of intermediate accumulation.

All right, moving to your question three, safe for peace of mind, you're considering transitioning the personal brokerage to a risk parity style portfolio before you take the securities back to line of credit.

Well, yeah, that would be safer in terms of not getting a margin call on the line of credit, but it also depends kind of how much credit you're taking out on this.

Ideally, what you do is you invest it based on your overall time frame.

So if you don't plan to use the money for decades, then you invest it like a long-term holding, which can be mostly or 100% stocks.

If you plan on using it earlier, then maybe you do put it in a risk parity style portfolio.

That would be much safer in terms of avoiding a margin call, if you will, or avoiding some kind of call of it wasn't clear to me whether you were doing this on margin or through a bank loan.

You are correct that you will reduce the volatility by about half between the risk parity style portfolio and the hundred percent equity portfolio, or maybe more than half.

Question four.

The weakening dollar, you're considering upping the portion of VXUS.

I know you don't have a crystal ball.

Now you can also use the ball to connect to the spirit world.

Could you quickly speak to my equity allocations more generally?

Well, actually, I've got two crystal balls now, thanks to my friend Bill.

But I doubt they're gonna tell me much that's useful.

Now the crystal ball has been used since ancient times.

It's used for scrying, healing, and meditation.

You may want to go back and listen to episodes 393 and 403 about the real differences between international and US stocks, because most of the difference between them these days, particularly when we're talking about these large cap funds, has to do with currency valuations.

That when the dollar is weaker against foreign currencies, international does better as it has this year.

In years when the dollar is stronger against foreign currencies, international does worse.

But they tend to go in the same direction and these days are pretty highly correlated for the most part.

So it's not like you're likely to see years where the U.S.

is down and international is up, at least when you're talking about these kinds of total market funds and similar.

And I definitely do not have a crystal ball as to whether the US dollar is likely to be stronger or weaker against foreign currencies next year or in any particular year.

We don't know.

What do we know?

You don't know, I don't know, nobody knows.

You can allocate as much to international as you're comfortable with.

Usually people limit it to one-third or less simply because that's kind of the overall market allocations worldwide these days.

I would not use VXUS though.

Not gonna do that.

It's not really a very good fund performance-wise.

Wouldn't be prudent at this juncture.

What I would do is look for an international large cap growth fund.

I prefer IDMO.

Go look at that.

And I would use a international small cap value fund like AVDV.

I'm telling you, fellas, you're gonna want that cowbell.

And if you look at how those have performed, you'll see they greatly outperform VXUS when international is doing well.

I mean, they're up like 40 or 50 percent this year compared to more like 30 for VXUS.

That's what I'm talking about.

VXUS just has the equivalent of a lot of large cap value kind of stocks.

And it's actually not really that diversified from something like VTI.

May have been the best you could do 15 or 20 years ago, but we don't live 15 or 20 years ago anymore.

So we have a lot better choices to make these days, and you should be making them.

You must unlearn what you have learned.

And if you go search IDMO in the podcasts on the page at www.riskparity.com, you will find several more episodes about these kinds of choices.

And you said, lastly, you were wondering if I had any experience of being a limited partner.

And what do I think about incorporating these type of investments into a risk parity portfolio?

And the answer is not exactly.

I have invested in things like Prosper and Lending Club, where you're effectively a limited partner.

I found them to be illiquid and not very tax-efficient, so I don't do things like that anymore.

Forget about it.

But the real question is not the form here, but what exactly are you invested in?

Is this real estate?

Is it a company?

Is it debt?

What is it?

Because that is typically how you would characterize it if you're going to put it in a portfolio.

The other problem you have with it is can you rebalance it?

Because if you can't rebalance it, then how are you going to put it in your portfolio?

It's a piece of crap.

It doesn't work.

But just knowing that something is presented in the form of a limited partnership does not really tell you much about how it should be characterized or whether it should even be included with the rest of your portfolio.

I tend to keep things that are illiquid separate because they cannot be managed with the rest of the portfolio.

So if you have, for instance, rental properties, I treat that as a separate business with a cash flow coming out of it that can be applied to your expenses and not as part of a portfolio because you can't sell pieces of it and buy something else or buy extra pieces of it.

And so that's probably what I would do with a limited partnership interest, depending on the underlying investment itself.

But hopefully all that helps, or at least some of it helps.

A lot of interesting questions.

And thank you for your email.

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.

The second rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club.

Second off.

Second off, we have an email from Michael.

And Michael writes.

Hi Frank.

Thanks for answering my previous email in episode 448.

Your thoughts regarding historical versus simulated data made a lot of sense to me.

I have another question, this time about tax location.

You have talked about this several times before, and I agree with your advice that one should try to avoid putting investments that throw off ordinary income into the brokerage account.

However, some of what you say about Roth versus traditional 401k investment seems backwards to me.

It is also possible, likely, that I am making a mistake or have have misinterpreted what you are saying, but I would like to get your thoughts.

Let's consider the simplified example that we have only a stock fund that will have large capital appreciation and a bond fund that will have smaller appreciation via dividends.

Let's also make the assumption that we have $20,000 that we would like to invest evenly between the two funds, and because of contribution limits, we can only put half in the Roth account and half in the traditional account.

Let's further make the assumption that our current tax rate is higher than our retirement tax rate.

My understanding of your position is that the stock fund should be located in the Roth and the bond fund should be located in the traditional account.

I think this is backwards.

Let's put some numbers to an example.

Let's assume that the investment is for a period of time such that the bond fund will grow to 10 times the initial investment and the stock fund will grow to 20 times.

For ease of calculation, let's also assume that our current tax rate is 50% and our future tax rate is 25%.

In this scenario, we have the following.

Stock fund and Roth account, we pay 50% tax now, and so $5,000 goes into the stock fund.

This grows to $100,000, which is then never taxed.

Bond fund in Roth account, we pay 50% tax now, and so $5,000 goes into the bond fund, which grows to $50,000, which is never taxed.

Stock fund into the traditional account, we invest $10,000 into the stock fund.

It grows to $200,000, which is then taxed at $25%.

So we have $150,000 in the future.

Bond fund into the traditional account, we invest $10,000 into the bond fund, it grows to $100,000, which is then taxed at $25%.

So we have $75,000 in the future.

Therefore, putting stocks in the Roth and bonds in the traditional will net us $100,000 plus $75,000 equals $175,000 of future purchasing power.

Putting stocks in the traditional and bonds in the Roth will net us $150,000 plus $50,000 equals $200,000 of future purchasing power.

In either tax advantage account, there is not a difference between growing by reinvesting ordinary income distributions versus growing via price appreciation.

So in both of these examples, the only salient point is that our future tax rate is lower than our current tax rate.

If they were the same, there is no difference between a Roth and a traditional account.

Multiplying at the end is the same as the beginning.

So for both investments, if your future tax rate is lower than your current tax rate, traditional is the better option.

If there is limited space, it should be allocated to the investment that will grow more.

Please let me know what I'm failing to consider.

Best Mike.

You are talking about the nonsensical ravings of a lunatic mind.

Well, Michael, I think you might be a bit confused here, but the problem is with your analysis that if you are trying to determine whether one variable or how one variable affects a system that has multivariables in it, you need to leave all the other variables the same and only change the one variable.

And that's how you decide what kind of effect changing that variable has on the entire system.

So here it is confusing and unhelpful to be talking about different kinds of investments in a Roth versus a traditional with different tax rates.

You should be holding either the investments constant or the tax rates constant.

But you do reach the correct conclusion that if your tax rate is higher to begin with than it will be in the future, then you are most likely better off with the traditional account because you're going to save more on taxes going in than you're going to pay going out.

And if the tax rates were exactly the same, then it wouldn't matter.

Whether you're investing in stocks or bonds in these particular accounts is beside the point.

But the context of your question is also not the same when I was talking about.

And I also think that it's not very helpful to be using examples of things that are unlikely to occur.

And in this case, what you're talking about, people putting a fixed amount in these accounts and then never changing it is not the way people invest.

And so in order to make this a real world thing to think about and talk about, you need to be thinking about what you would actually do in real life.

And what you would actually do in real life, and what I tell people to do, is when you are accumulating, put all of your money into stocks or almost all of it into stocks.

So you're not investing in bonds.

I don't know where that came from.

There's no reason for somebody in their 20s to be putting money into bond funds, whether they're putting it in a traditional or a Roth.

But then the question becomes when you're moving or transitioning to a retirement portfolio and you are spreading out your assets into more different kinds of asset classes, including bonds and other things, then you are faced with a choice at that time, not earlier, at that time, as to which funds are you going to transition into bonds or alternatives or something else, and which accounts are you going to hold those things in?

That's the question here.

How do you transition from one portfolio to another in the most tax-efficient way going forward?

So the assumption you should be making is that you've accumulated some amount of money in traditional accounts and Roth accounts and in taxable brokerage accounts, and it's pretty much all invested in stocks or close to it.

And you're transitioning to a retirement portfolio.

What is the best way to organize that?

And the best way to organize that is to put your lowest growth but highest ordinary income paying things in your traditional accounts from there.

Because that way you can avoid paying the ordinary income tax generated if you were to leave those ordinary income things in your taxable account.

But you also, in terms of where you want the growth to be going forward, you want most of that growth to be in the Roth account because it's never going to get taxed.

So if you have very large capital gains, you would want those more in your Roth account than in the traditional account.

Because when they take the money out of the traditional account, obviously you're going to pay taxes on it regardless of what it's invested in inside the account.

And that's what we're talking about here.

We're not talking about investing in bond funds when you're working in or 20 years from retirement.

Because in fact, if your tax rate was 50%, as you surmise or are assuming, you wouldn't be putting anything in a Roth account.

You'd be putting it all in the traditional account.

It would be silly to be putting money into a Roth account after paying a 50% tax on it when you know that your tax is going to be lower later.

If you're looking for more information on this, the book written by Sean Mullaney and Cody Garrett about taxes in early retirement that I've linked to several times recently is a good place to go.

And also look up some of their interviews.

They've been on the Whitecoat Investor and other podcasts recently talking about these very issues as to when to choose traditional accounts and when to choose Roth accounts, and their view that people are too fixated on putting money into Roth accounts early when they should be recognizing that they are likely to be paying more taxes at that time in their working life than they will be in retirement.

This whole scare tactic nonsense that goes on by people named Dead Shot or something that rhymes with that is kind of bogus and it's generally perpetuated by people who are associated with the insurance industry.

Am I right or am I right or am I right?

Right, right, right.

Who are trying to get you to be afraid of future taxes as much as possible, because that helps them sell more product.

Because only one thing counts in this life.

Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.

The truth is that even if nominal tax rates are raised in the future, your personal tax rate is still likely to be lower in retirement than it is currently.

Especially if you organize your assets into the accounts the way I and they also suggest, in terms of appropriate tax location of your retirement assets.

But here's a question you should ask people who are insistent on all rough all the time early on, no matter what the attacks rates are.

Ask them whether if you make $100,000 this year and you make $100,000 next year, and it's ordinary income, are your taxes going to be higher in the second year, lower in the second year, or the same?

Most people actually get this wrong because they don't understand how the tax code works.

The way the tax code works is the brackets expand every year due to an inflation adjustment.

So any nominal amount in any given year is going to be paying lower taxes in the future.

And if your personal inflation rate is lower than the CPI and the rate at which the brackets are expanding, unless they change the law, you have to be paying lower taxes in retirement.

Think about that for a bit.

But that's the way the tax laws are written.

You can't handle the truth.

Couple that with the fact that you're going to be able to time the taxes you pay in retirement by deciding when to take money out of traditional versus Roth versus taxable.

And I can tell you the one thing that keeps dropping precipitously for us in retirement is our tax bill.

That's the fact, Jack!

That's the fact, Jack!

Except for the property taxes.

Can't control that.

Just need to sell these things.

Anyway, the lesson you should take from this is to make sure you are actually modeling something that is real and not making up something to try to prove a point.

Because a lot of that goes on in personal finance where people, quote, prove unquote, something by making assumptions that are not very real world or that mix up variables and make the problem more difficult than it needs to be.

So hopefully that clarifies things a little bit.

You definitely want to go study tax location now.

And thank you for your email.

Last off.

Last off an email from John.

How about John?

That's nice and simple.

What are you serious?

Well, yeah.

John, you want to do that to the kid?

Do what?

And John Wright.

Hi, Frank.

Thanks so much for your podcast.

I've listened with great interest since I'm planning to retire next year.

Looking at portfolio charts, looking at the safe and long-term withdrawal rates for both the golden butterfly and the weird portfolios are very similar.

The asset allocations overlap somewhat, but also go in some different directions.

I was wondering about the possibility of combining both to get even more diversity and resistance to shifts in correlation.

What would this combined portfolio look like in terms of asset allocation percentages?

I'm somewhat math disabled and can't quite wrap my head around the numbers.

Thanks.

Hey, John, hey, let's go to the John!

Huh, John, let's go.

Wouldn't he outgrow those jokes?

Look, kids are mean.

Look, I just want them to have a happy childhood too, but long John Silver, I mean, I don't know what to say.

Well, John, the answer is less scintillating than you might expect, which is that if you combine those things or pieces of the golden butterfly and the weird portfolios, you're gonna get similar results.

And you're going to get similar results for all of these kinds of portfolios because they are basically in the zone as far as having high safe withdrawal rates is concerned.

Really, the difference here is the overall equity allocation that if you have more equities in the portfolio, like something like the Weird Portfolio, you have potentially higher returns over time, but most likely higher volatility, which gets you to the same kind of safe withdrawal rate you have with a golden butterfly type portfolio, which has fewer equities in it and lower volatility.

What you don't want to get fixated on are particular formulas here, because we're applying principles, and it's the principles that give you kind of a range of outcomes for portfolios with higher safe withdrawal rates.

I think the easiest way for you to understand this without getting into too much math is to go listen to my interviews on the Afford Anything podcast number 618 that I'll link to in the show notes and also provide you with a little AI-generated slideshow from that.

And also the first interview I did on Bigger Pockets Money last summer.

And I'll also provide you with some slides from that because those will give you the overall parameters for portfolios that have higher safe withdrawal rates.

And I'll also include the blueprint that Paula Pant created with afford anything that went with that podcast, and you can check that out.

But it basically gives you the guidelines for portfolios that have higher safe withdrawal rates in terms of what kind of equities do they have in them, what kind of bonds, what are the range of percentages, what kind of alternatives, and then not having too much cash.

And if you have portfolios with things within those ranges, you're going to get similar results here, whether you're using something like the golden butterfly or weird portfolio or golden ratio.

The ultimate specifics matter less than applying the principles, which give you a range of possibilities.

But no, you're not going to get significantly different results by combining various pieces of these things because this that's really not how diversification works in this context.

That's not how it works.

That's not how any of this works.

I'm also going to link for you to an article that Tyler wrote about the Golden Ratio portfolio in particular, because it talks about how you are using assets with higher volatilities to get a portfolio with a lower volatility through the process of diversification.

And that's what's going on with all of these kinds of portfolios.

But hopefully taking a look at a few of these things in a written form will make things easier and won't require you to be doing math based on what people are saying on podcasts, which is not really the easiest thing to do.

She finded me with science!

She finded me with science.

Check out the resources, and thank you for your email.

Now we are going to do something extremely fun.

And the extremely fun thing we get to do now is our weekly portfolio reviews of the eight sample portfolios you can find at www.riskparty.com on the portfolios page.

Just looking at what the markets are doing this year.

It's all green.

I love money.

The SP 500, represented by VOO, is up 19.27% for the year.

The NASDAQ 100, represented by QQQ, is up 22.65% for the year.

Small cap value, represented by the fund VIOV, is up 8.5% for the year.

Gold, represented by the fund GLDM, continues to shine quite brightly.

I love gold.

Representative fund GLDM is up 72.55% for the year.

Long-term treasury bonds represented by the fund VGLT are up 5.82%.

REITs represented by the fund REET are up 8.36%.

Commodities represented by the fund PDBC are up 7.51%.

Preferred shares represented by the fund PFFV are up 2.22% for the year.

And finally, managed futures, represented by the fund DBMF, are managing to be up now 15.42% for the year so far.

Sounds like we should have sort of constructed our portfolios out of gold and managed futures.

I gotta have more cowbell.

Which is considerably more than an An international total market fund like VXUS, which is only up about 30% only.

And it's funny you have a year like this where the dollar is weak, and that's a particular feature of this year that tends to make all of your assets go up in value in dollars.

It's like everybody gets a car.

So going through these sample portfolios, first ones of all seasons, this is a reference portfolio.

It's only 30% in stocks and a total stock market fund, 55% in intermediate and long-term treasury bonds, and the remaining 15% in gold and commodities.

It's up 0.48% for the month of December.

It's up 14.85% year to date, and up 24.68% since inception in July 2020.

Moving to these kind of bread and butter portfolios.

First one's Gold and Butterfly.

This one is 40% stocks divided into a total stock market fund and a small cap value fund.

40% in treasury bonds divided into long and short, and 20% in gold, GLDM.

It is up 2.2% for the month of December.

It's up 21.32% year to date, and up 62.48% since inception in July 2020.

Next one's golden ratio.

A number so perfect.

Perfect.

We find it everywhere.

Everywhere.

Sacred geometry.

Sacred geometry.

Ha ha!

This one is 42% in stocks divided into a large cap growth fund and a small cap value fund.

26% in long-term treasury bonds, 16% in gold, 10% in a managed futures fund, and 6% in cash in a money market fund.

It's up 2.01% for the month of December.

It's up 21.05% year to date, and up 57.3% since inception in July 2020.

Next one's the Risk Perry Ultimate.

I won't be going through all 12 of these funds, at least not this week.

It's kind of our kitchen sink portfolio.

It's up 1.53% for the month of December.

It's up 19.32% year to date, and up 42.4% since inception in July 2020.

Now moving to these experimental portfolios.

Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps.

Yes, we perform hideous experiments here.

At least some of them are hideous, with leveraged funds.

So don't try this at home.

You can't handle the gambling problem.

First one's the accelerated permanent portfolio.

This one is 27.5% in a levered bond fund TMF.

25% in UPRO, it's a levered SP 500 fund.

25% in PFFV, a preferred shares fund, and 22.5% in gold.

It's up 1.33% for the month of December.

It's up 25.83% year to date, and up 27.12% since inception in July 2020.

Moving to the next one, this is the aggressive 50-50.

This is the most levered and least diversified of these portfolios, and by far the worst performer.

It's one-third in a levered stock fund UPRO, one-third in a levered bond fund TMF, and the remaining third divided into a preferred shares fund and an intermediate treasury bond fund as ballast.

It's down 1.09% for the month of December.

It's up 13.79% year to date, and up 0.22% since inception in July 2020.

Next one's the levered golden ratio.

This is a year younger than the first six.

This one is 35% in a composite levered fund called NTSX, that is the S P 500 and Treasury Bonds, levered up 1.5 to 1.

10% in AVDV, that International Small Cap Value Fund.

20% in GLDM.

That's gold, Jerry, gold.

10% in KMLM, which is a managed futures fund, 10% in TMF, which is a levered bond fund, and the remaining 10% in UDOW and UTSL, which are a levered Dow fund and a levered utilities fund.

It is up 1.59% for the month of December.

It's up 28.12% year to date, and up 22.45% since inception in July 2021.

And the last one is our newest one, the OPTRA portfolio.

One portfolio to rule them all, and in fact it is ruling them all.

This is a return-stacked kind of portfolio.

It is 16% in UPRO, that's a levered SP 500 fund, 24% in AVGV, which is a worldwide value tilted fund.

24% in GOVZ, that's a Treasury Strips fund, and the remaining 36% divided into gold in a managed futures fund.

It is up 2.86% for the month of December.

It's up 28.64% year-to-date, and up 32.39% since inception in July 2024.

It's only about 18 months old.

And that concludes our weekly portfolio reviews for the last full week of 2025.

And it's got poof.

We will be reviewing all these on an annual basis in our annual review program next weekend.

Probably won't be another podcast until then.

It's not that I'm lazy.

It's that I just don't care.

And with that, now I see our signal is beginning to fade.

If you have comments or questions for me, please send them to Frank at RiskParityRadio.com.

That email is Frank at RiskParodyRadio.com.

Or you can go to the website www.riskparodyradio.com.

Put your message into the contact form and I'll get it that way.

If you haven't had a chance to do it, please go to your favorite podcast provider and like, subscribe, give me some stars, a follow, a review.

That would be great.

Okay.

Thank you once again for tuning in.

This is Frank Vasquez with Risk Cardi Radio.

Signing off.