Quarterly Update 2025

Introduction to the Quarterly Roundup

(00.00.20 – Marc Odo)

Okay. Well, good afternoon, and thanks for joining us for the second quarter of twenty twenty five quarterly roundup. Hard to believe that the year is already half over, but here we are, and it’s certainly been an eventful first half of the year. Lots going on in the markets and beyond the markets to talk about here.

So with me, as always, we have Randy Swan, Founder, President, Lead Portfolio Manager at Swan Global Investments, along with Chris Hausman, Senior Portfolio Manager, to discuss all the things that we’ve been seeing in this first half of twenty twenty five.

Market Overview: Turbulence and Recovery

(00:36.20 – Marc Odo)

 And before I really start diving into the numbers, I want to kind of set the stage here, because one of the things I always like to do with these calls, you’re a frequent listener, is establish a theme. There’s some sort of overarching theme that’s going to tie all these slides together, hopefully in a cohesive story. And what we’re going with today in the first half overview here is that in order to really understand the stock markets, you need to look beyond the stock markets.

We can’t just be narrowly focused on the S &P500 or the MAG seven because there’s a lot going on beyond that, and that’s going to help inform us and help us understand what to expect going forward that could potentially happen with the equity markets. Now, as far as the equity markets themselves, again, very tumultuous period here. We had an intraday bear market where the market sold off. The S and P was off more than twenty percent peak to trough intra-market.

When you’re looking at market closes, not quite a bear market, but very close to it. Now, of course, all of that was really caused by the tariff trauma or tariff turmoil that was associated with Liberation Day, which kicked off the quarter. Right? That was on April second.

Market Highs: A Closer Look

(01:44.80 – Marc Odo)

April was a very crazy month, but then we had this fierce rally. Just as violent to the downside, we had a violent upside rally to take us through the back half of the quarter. And June thirtieth was actually a all time market high. So we actually ended on the market high there.

But again, what we want to do is to put this in context is look beyond just the equity markets.

Some of the things that people have always regarded as safe havens like the dollar and treasuries, little bit wavery, little shaky. People are uncertain there. And, also, gold is pushing new all time highs because of this uncertainty that’s going on here. We’re also seeing people go into international markets. International markets have been kind of a laggard for quite some time now. But again, with all this turmoil and uncertainty, people are moving their assets away from the S&P 500.

Analyzing Market Data: A Deeper Dive

(02:25.20 – Marc Odo)

Now, again, we need to kind of drill down to really understand what happened in the market here. And we do that by looking at daily data. So this is the second quarter and the red line is the S&P 500. And we see that steep drawdown, which actually compounded on about a five percent loss that was on the fourth quarter, excuse me, the first quarter.

And then we had that steep rally, that sharp rally. What’s interesting here, the blue line bonds. Bonds really didn’t rally like you’d expect they would when the markets were diving. The traditional playbook is that equity markets go down, people flee to bonds.

Well, maybe not so much this time. What we did see, though, is this big VIX spike. The VIX closed over fifty for the first time in five years. The last time the VIX closed over fifty was during the COVID pandemic in early twenty twenty.

Swan’s Hedged Equity Strategy Explained

(03:25.40- Marc Odo)

So certainly, yes, a lot of things going on. And one thing to mention, when it comes to Swan’s hedged equity products, the always invested, always hedged approach that we use is built of three different components. There’s the core equity allocation, there’s the hedge allocation, and then there’s the additional trades, the additional option trades that we do to help offset the carrying cost of the hedge.

Before we start looking at individual products, I do have to put one thing out there from kind of a compliance standpoint. We do separate the mutual funds from our ETFs. For compliance purposes, we have to talk about each of the mutual funds and ETFs separately and in turn. That being said, the themes that we talked about and are trying to establish here, you’re going to see carry out throughout this entire presentation. These broad themes affected all of our mutual funds, all of our ETFs.

Performance Review: SDRIX Mutual Fund

(04:15.90 Marc Odo)

But that being said, let’s go ahead and take a look at the overview, the broad overview of our flagship mutual fund, SDRIX. And you can see that year to date, we’ve had decent returns, right? About half of the market, which you would expect.

In the second quarter, we had about maybe a forty percent, maybe a little bit less capture ratio. Again, these things are within expectations and we can see how the different components, the core component, those put option hedges and our income components have done both year to date and within the individual quarters. Everything is pretty reasonable given what we’ve experienced. We also have the growth fund.

Now the growth fund is tilted for a little bit more upside exposure at the expense of having potentially more downside exposure. And that played itself out again here, right? In the second quarter, the overall capture ratio was about two thirds to the upside. When you look at year to date, about two thirds as well.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Market Performance

(05:11.50 Marc Odo)

So to dive into these numbers and pick things apart in the framework that we like to call the good, the bad and the ugly, Randy is going to come in here and talk about some of the things that worked for the funds and for the broader markets and economy and some of the things that didn’t. So Randy, why don’t you take us through some of the positives first?

(05:28.50 Randy Swan)

Well, the first positive is obviously the market’s making all time highs. There was a lot of turbulence in the first half of the year. But as of right now, through the end of the second quarter, everything looks really good.

This next slide kind of goes through and shows how we did in real time relative to the market for two of our products, or two of our mutual fund products. And you can see year to date, we’re kind of performing as expected.

And also during the drawdowns, during the worst part of the sell-off this spring, we think we performed very well.

Just to note that the two different mutual funds, the growth is SDAIX, and that has a lower strike price. And so you should expect to have a bigger drawdown. But that sell-off at almost a 19% sell-off on the S&P 500, yeah, we would expect high single-digit losses during that time frame.

Call Spreads: Strategy and Impact

(06:32.20 Randy Swan)

One of the things that really worked out after this sell off in April was that we either added to or added some initial call spreads to our portfolios. And what does that really mean? A call spread is buying a call option and selling a further out of the money call option. And so what that does is synthetically create additional exposure to the market. And so generally speaking, some of our products have call spreads on at all times. Other ones are more tactical in nature, where we waited for the sell off. And so one of the good things is that we added to our call spread positions in April during the sell off, and that allowed us to have more upside capture after the rebound.

Active Management: Exploiting Market Dislocations

(07:20.90 Randy Swan)

Okay, great. I would like to add a point there before we move on to the next slide, and that’s regarding our active management. One of the things that does set Swan apart is that we are active managers, and we try to exploit some of these market dislocations, essentially, buying low and selling high. When the markets did sell off, that was one of these opportunities that we had to essentially buy the market low, and that’s the role of these call spreads. So thank you for diving into that.

Where are we today relative to the markets?

Well, the mark, we’re not that far away from the strike price on one of our funds and a little further out risky, more growth-oriented strategy. But fundamentally, we typically lock those in during the year. And so making a comment about the rehedge process – just so everyone’s clear – adding call spreads on a smaller sell-off is one of the ways that we have active management introduce active management to our portfolio management process. And then the re hedge is the second component. We did not hit the levels that we would normally re-hedge the portfolios. Therefore, we did not do that in April. That being said, that’s something that we do set up for larger sell offs in that 20-25% sell off from the most recent re-hedge, which was at the end of last year in December.

Identifying Market Negatives

(08:47.00 Marc Odo)

Okay. Well, certainly some positives to note for the second quarter and year to date. What about some of the negatives? What are the things that either specific to Swan or that the broad bigger picture that has you a little bit concerned?

(08:58.80 Randy Swan)

Well, on a macro basis, I think there’s still a lot of unknowns as it relates to some of the tariff issues and obviously some of the various wars that are going around the globe. So that’s always has some uncertainty. It seems to me, like in April, most people overreacted to the tariff.

Obviously, hindsight is always 20/20 We can look at this at the end of June and the end of July where we are right now and say, hey, it seems like the market’s actually coming around to favorably look at some of the tariffs. Although it’s not really a done deal or everything has been resolved, but that’s something that did create a lot of anxiety for the markets.

Volatility’s Impact on Premium Collection

(09:42.50 Randy Swan)

Of course, had with that extreme volatility that we had early in the end of the first quarter, beginning of the second quarter, which negatively affected our premium collection trades. That means when we sell short-dated premium, try to generate income to help pay for the hedge. So those have slight losses during the year, but overall, pretty much as expected.

We always kind of go back to this constant theme, and I think this is on the next slide, where we show the valuations in the market. And I feel like this is just a repetitive seems like we bring this up every quarter, every year. And nothing’s really changed about that. All historic frameworks on how to value markets, it’s either expensive, very expensive, almost one hundred percent. So has anything really changed this year? Not really. Nothing’s really changed in terms of the valuations in terms of how things are priced relative to historic metrics.

Yield Curve Trends and Implications

(10:50.00 Randy Swan)

Seems like the yield curve is steepening right now. That means the back end is getting more expensive. That’s what you would expect.

Not sure what that really means for any long-term trends right now. As of course, everyone knows that the current administration would like the Federal Reserve to lower rates.

The Federal Reserve has said they don’t want to lower rates right now. We will see how that ultimately plays out. I’ve always been a believer that ultimately the markets determine the rates and the Federal Reserve seems to kind of follow what is kind of assumed within the market.

And the markets are bigger than the Fed, actually.

Yeah, this is another example of what we discussed when we talked about looking beyond the equity markets to understand the broad markets. This is a pretty big swing over the last year. These are the two yield curves. The blue was a year ago. Orange is where we stand today. And yes, certainly the markets are anticipating that the Fed will cut rates somewhat, and it’s gonna come down and cut the rates a little bit. But it’s really the back end where the larger concerns are.

Bond Investor Sentiment and Risks

(11:52.10 Randy Swan)

Bond investors essentially insisting that treasuries give them over five percent to compensate for some of these newer risks. And we’ll talk about those in a second. Mean, they’re not really maybe new risks about the whole government over spending, but it is much more a front burner issue these days than it’s been previously. I think previously people have just ignored that hoping it would go away, but eventually maybe the bond vigilantes are returning.

Technical Analysis of the S&P 500

(12:17.70 Marc Odo)

But with that, I’d like to kind of maybe pivot here and start looking about what we can reasonably expect or what might happen going forward over the next couple of quarters here, I’m going to bring in Chris Houseman, has an extensive background in technical analysis and always has good insight on the options market. So, Chris, what are you seeing?

(12:37.60 Chris Hausman)

Yeah. Thanks, Mark. Yeah. So let’s take a look here, technically in the S&P 500 during the second quarter and some of the more recent action.

You know, last time we spoke, we mentioned the bulls had to get over some new hurdles to be in the discussion of whether or not a short-term bottom was in. First, that 5500 level had to be taken out, and that happened in late April. Next, the infamous 250 moving average needed to be crossed, and that happened with conviction with a gap higher through that average of fifty seven fifty on May twelfth. You know, after that, there was a subsequent test of the two hundred day on May 23rd, but that held his support, and that really was when the tide turned to a bullish outlook, or at least a plausible run, to test all-time highs, which was around 6150 at that time.

Market Signals: Death Crosses and Golden Crosses

(13:19.60 Chris Hausman)

You know, the media loves to talk about, death crosses and golden crosses, but the reality is that, you know, they’re not really great trading signals when they happen. You have a a lagging moving average crossing another one. And if you had taken that death cross as a literal trading signal, which is when the 50-day drops below the 200-day moving average, and conversely exited on the golden cross, you would have lost about eight hundred points in the S&P 500. So, like anything else in technical analysis, you know, you can never use or rely on just one signal.

You have to use a you have to use multiple tools that create that confluence of signals. Right? So you need to use many colors to create a story or a picture that tilts the probability in your favor when supporting a thesis. So getting back to the market here, you know, after what was a pretty intense sell-off that we mentioned in April and one of the worst starts to a year in history, you know, we then had that very intense V-shaped recovery.

Historical Context of Market Performance

(14:09.80 Chris Hausman)

If you go back to 1950, now there are only two years when the S&P 500 was down double digits in the first half of the year and then rallied to finish the first half positive. That happened back in 2009 and 2016. You know, looking at where the market may go from here, well, you know, we just came off a very volatile quarter, and the market has a tendency to overdo it the other way. In other words, you know, don’t be surprised for a very calm second half of the year.

And now that the market has set new all-time highs, one possibility, you know, that we feel is just hugging the old support line of the upward trend channel that we’ve been watching for some time. So if that scenario plays out, you know, again, we feel that we could be looking at 65.0 to 67.50 by year end. On the downside, as far as support’s concerned, it’s pretty much a reset button now, you know, where the 200-day moving average was, and that mid-May gap up at about five thousand seven hundred fifty to five thousand eight hundred.

Market Breadth: Analyzing Underlying Strength

(15:03.90 Chris Hausman)

You know, part of creating that overall market thesis is looking under the hood or market breadth. You It’s part of the analysis that should show health or potential warning signals, and I kind of compare it to a car engine.

How many people really look at their car engine or clean their car engine? The main concern is can this thing get me from point a to point b? And that’s like price. And price is tradable, and not market breadth.

And, you know, it can certainly be used to point out potential warning signs like I mentioned, but the main goal is is really to see whether, you know, a bull market is behaving like a bull market or is a bear market behaving like a bear market. You know, not all stocks go up in a bull market. Not all stocks go up at the same pace. So the main thing is checking whether those stocks that should be going up in a bull market are actually going up.

Right now, the answer is yes. Leadership has shifted back to technology.

VIX Analysis: Understanding Volatility Signals

(15:52.90 Chris Hausman)

Consumer discretionary is back above its respective fifty and 200-day moving average. And if you look at the defensive sectors like health care and consumer staples, well, those are trading below their major moving averages. You know, another thing that you look at is whether or not we’re overextended. And a little bit more than half the S&P 500 stocks are above their 200-day moving average, so there is room to move higher there. Historically, things don’t get frothy until we hit about eighty percent of the stocks above their 200-day moving average.

Here we’re just looking at the VIX over the last year, and what clearly sticks out is that we’ve had two major VIX spikes intraday within a nine-month period. Spikes over 50 are pretty rare. If you look at the VIX, know, they’re pretty rare if you go back all the way to nineteen ninety, but what we’ve actually been averaging one every two years over the last ten years.

Volatility Regimes: Current Observations

(16:41.70 Chris Hausman)

You know, these kind of spikes are usually pretty good buy signals, you know, in the market over the next three, six and  12-month periods, averages about five, eight and twenty percent higher, respectively. You know, just as the VIX quickly spiked up, well, it came crashing down from the April eighth peak to the late June, you know, to the late to late June, the VIX dropped 69%, which is the largest percentage drop in its history dating back to that nineteen ninety year. You know, and last review, we posed that question of whether or not we were entering a new volatility regime well. You know, it certainly looked that way at the time, but markets decided other ways, you know, at least for the short term here. So and with that, I’ll turn it back over to Marc.

Long-Term Solutions for Market Challenges

(16:41.70 Marc Odo)

Okay, great. Thanks.

Well, yeah, that gave us a look at the immediate future here, kind of the market for what we might expect over the rest of the 2025 here. But really, what drives people to Swan solution is the big picture. I mean, we position ourselves as being a long-term solution for long-term problems.

And some of the things that we’ve harped on always are really moving back to front of the public consciousness.

So Randy, why don’t you take us through some of those things and why we think hedged equity makes sense?

(17:58.00  Randy Swan)

Well, we’ve had an overriding theme for a long time now, and that is an unsustainable debt trajectory where at some point, it’s going to be a big problem for the market.

Obviously, right now, as I said earlier, were focused on more of the tariff issues and seem to be kind of getting over that. And hey, the markets are making new all-time highs. But we do have this fundamental problem of, at some point, this is going to become a big issue. And so I think you see that in this kind of buy now, pay later.

We’ll go through some stuff like that. And look at all these different assets where it seems like the dollar is losing value.

Treasuries, even though that everyone wants the Federal Reserve to lower rates, treasuries, in fact, haven’t really gone down. Because like I said, the markets are stronger than the Fed. And they’re telling us that there’s a bigger issue. And I think people are starting to really focus on the actual debt issues.

And I think where it really matters at this point is you get a new administration in, everyone talks a big game about how they’re going to cut spending. And guess what? They just passed the big beautiful bill. And we’re new bosses the same as the old boss.

Uncharted Territory of Spending and Debt

(19:12.80 Randy Swan)

We’re currently in this uncharted territory of continuing to spend more and more money. And so how this resolves, when it resolves, no one really knows. But I think the markets are finally signaling that this is a long-term problem.

So as it relates to what I kind of think the rest of this year, well, I see the market going higher over the short term. But once again, I think we’ll see what happens when they start doing the next bill this fall, whether or not they actually start focusing on spending reduction, although I wouldn’t bet on it at this point.

And this just shows the dispersion of different assets. You’ve got, obviously, treasury bonds, Bitcoin, dollar, gold, all those kind of things. We’re going have a great gold chart later on in the presentation. But this just kind of shows everything is going in different directions because everyone’s trying to figure out how this is really going to play out.

And this is just once again why we focus on the long run. Always invest in equities, always have clients, have exposure to the equity market through low cost tax efficient ETFs, hedge out that market risk, obviously keep some of the risk in the portfolio, but try to worry about big bear markets, hedge against big bear markets, and when possible, when appropriate, seek additional return through different buying and selling of short term options.

Investment Strategies in a Changing Market

(20:46.40 Marc Odo)

Yeah, and I think this is a great slide here to kind of be the answer to what Swan’s thoughts when it comes to do you react to this changing market environment. In that previous slide, saw that chaos. Saw that people are starting to abandon some of these traditional safe harbors like treasuries and the dollar. People don’t have as much faith in them.

They’re rushing into something old, gold, something new, Bitcoin, hoping that those things will be your hedge when the markets go down. But Swan’s answer has always been put options. Put options are inversely correlated. We know that they are a derivative contract that is inversely correlated with the underlying asset.

To us, that’s much more reliable. That’s what we’ve built our strategies on.

Facing some of these concerns going forward, I mean, Randy, you talked about this in your book, but it seems like other people are picking up on these themes too.

Yeah, I mean, we pulled up these three quotes. I could pull up another thirty quotes if we needed to, but I think it proves the point. Everyone acknowledges the long-term debt problem, and everyone says it’s going to happen. No one knows the timing, and I think that’s just still here.

The Path to Addressing Debt Issues

(21:58.00 Randy Swan)

And I think that is starting to affect the markets. If we go to the next slide, my thesis has been there is a path to victory. It’s getting narrower and narrower, and it’s threading the needle, the debt needle. What does that really mean?

We’ve got to cut spending. We’ve got to cut the trajectory of the debt growing. It’s not just a matter of cutting the deficits. It’s actually, at some point, trying to pay off this debt.

Can they really do that without adversely affecting the economy? So we’ve got this current administration that says, hey, we’re going to cut taxes, cut regulation, theoretically cut spending, although they always say it’s the biggest tax or spending cut ever. But of course, that’s true when you’re spending more money every year. It’s always going to be less as a percent or on a nominal basis, the highest cut you’ve ever seen.

Trump has introduced more tariffs.

It seems like right now the market’s actually reacting positively. So what we still don’t have is any really meaningful cuts. And that’s kind of the problem at the end of the day as you go through this issue is until we actually start spending cuts, we haven’t really fixed the problem. It’s not even a given. Even if we did cut spending, that it’s actually not going to create a bigger problem for the economy in terms of a recession or deflationary market environment.

Outcomes of Economic Policies Since the Crisis

(23:26.20 Randy Swan)

And outlined in our book, Investing Redefined (2019), we kind of said there was three outcomes, right? I think this kind of signifies what we’ve gone through over the last fifteen or so years since the financial crisis. We had very low inflation. We had low growth since the financial crisis. Hey, but the markets did really well.

Since about 2021, we’ve had higher inflation, which seems to have come down a little recently, but still higher than normal, higher than what we would like. And that was kind of our average outcome. And so that’s not necessarily a good long-term thing when the value of your assets are going down, at least on a real-term basis.

And of course, what this ultimately turns into is what the bad outcome is, a financial crisis, some type of deflationary crisis that we have because we cannot ultimately control our spending and deficits get out of control. So I think that’s kind of what we outlined. We kind of used the Pascal wager analogy of you’ve got to take into account every possible outcome in the markets, build your portfolio based on those probabilities, and not just assume that everything is going to be ultimately resolved positively.

This slide, I think, is pretty telling. And this kind of gets back to what are real returns, right? So everyone knows that in the Dot.com bubble before the market went down, the S and P was around fifteen hundred. The same thing before the financial crisis.

Real Returns and Market Valuation

(25:01.20 Randy Swan)

The S&P 500 on a nominal basis is significantly higher than it was before. But when you price it in gold, this is the S&P 500 priced in gold. In fact, since 1999, we’re actually declined about 65%.

It always goes back to I like to look at different S&P 500 price in nominal terms, maybe even CPI, but also in gold. And gold tells the tale that, yes, markets are higher nominally, but how much higher they are in real purchasing power. If you believe in gold as the ultimate determinant of pricing power, not so good. And of course, this goes back 26years. So this isn’t some type of short-term trend. This just kind of says, hey, the returns aren’t as real as you think they are.

Anticipating Future Economic Challenges

(25:54.40 Randy Swan)

And this goes back to our current Treasury Secretary. This quote was taken from last year before Trump even won the election before he was appointed. But he was alluding to something bigger coming down the pike. I’m not really sure exactly what that is.

It seems like some of these things they’ve already started doing. But like I said, the tariffs seem to be an Okay thing right now. But there is something brewing in the background, whether it’s digital currencies, some bigger debt crisis. Everyone seems to acknowledge it. This is the guy who runs the US Treasury, and he thinks it’s going to happen too. And so we’ll just have to wait and see how this thing plays out over the coming months and years.

Performance Review of Hedged Equity Funds

(26:39.40 Marc Odo)

All right, great. Well, thanks for taking us through that. Certainly a lot of food for thought, and I would like to think a little bit more thought-provoking than some of these other quarterly reviews that you might see out there where everyone says everything’s fine. Just throw all your money at the market.

I did mention at the outset that we talk about the ETFs in separate sections. So I’m going to go ahead and run through those right now. But again, the themes are the same. If you’re invested in our hedged equity ETF, HEGD, all these things about the market sell-off and having those hedges in place, they impacted the ETF in the same way that they impacted the mutual fund.

I always think, “a pictures’s worth a thousand words”. So rather than looking at all these text-heavy graphs here, let’s go ahead and take a look at the attribution. So, yes, what we see here is that the ETF also has a very nice capture ratio versus the S&P 500kind of running in that  2/3 range relative to its benchmark index there.

Yes, the hedge was down a little bit during the second quarter with the market setting all-time highs, but it was positive in the first quarter when the market was down about five percent or so.

If we were to take a look at the history going back to the inception, we’re in. We’re not quite there, but we’re closing in on five years of history. And this ETF has done what we had hoped it would do when we brought it to market, which is provide of the path that the S&P 500 would, maybe not all the upside, but certainly have a better risk mitigation characteristics than bonds, which have been rather stagnant for the last four and a half, five years. Looking at just the second quarter here, when we had that sell off, that steep sell off, again, we see these trends where looking at the daily data, looking at the tariff tantrum in April, the Swan HEGD ETF was down less than half than that of the market.

Now, the other product that we also have, of course, is our relatively new Enhanced Dividend Income Fund. That is a derivative income ETF that seeks to generate an additional source of returns from the writing of call options. These type of funds have become pretty popular of late. This one has just surpassed its one-year of history.

And again, the returns here are what you would hope for. We’re outperforming the benchmark index. The benchmark for this is not the S&P 500. It is the CBOE S&P 500 BuyWrite Index, which is, of course, a call writing index.

But the theme that we’ve always had here with this fund is that we’re actively managing it. We’re actively managing the stock portfolio, we’re actively managing the call writing, and we hope that each of those different elements would add value above a very passive approach to derivative income. So year to date for the first two quarters here of the year, yeah, we were looking good relative to our bogey there. Now we are coming up kind of towards the half-hour mark here. So think that I’m going to go ahead and wrap it up.

Just to summarize all the things that we discussed today.

1. The first bullet point is that in our opinion, during that big market sell off, the Swan hedge equity funds performed well.
2. Second, where are we today? Well, those put options remain in a favorable position relative to the market levels to hedge against potential sell offs in the back half of the year. We’re still near the money with those. Those put options aren’t in the money, but they’re near the money. And if the markets do pull another reversal here, pull another one hundred eighty, they should be in a good position to hedge the downside.

Current Market Conditions and Future Outlook

(30:22.80 Marc Odo)

Things are calming down a little bit right now in the markets. The markets are setting all-time highs.

One of the themes I heard someone else mention when they put out their review of the first half of the year is like, well, is what we’re living in right now just the eye of the storm or is the storm passed? Right. And no one knows at this point. Right.

And this might just be kind of a lull. Maybe it’s all smooth sailing ahead. No one knows. But again, we believe and this is the overarching theme for this session here is that we believe one needs to look beyond the equity markets to understand the equity markets, understand the big picture.

You can’t just be focused on the S&P 500. You need to look at international markets, look at the dollar, look at treasuries, look at gold, look at even things like cryptocurrency to see where people are shifting their assets.

The Importance of a Hedged Equity Approach

(31:09.70 Marc Odo)

And for all those variables that we’re dealing with here, Swan’s recommendation has been the same for over 28 years now. It’s always invested, always hedged. We don’t know what’s going to come next. No one does.

So therefore, what we believe is the best solution is to follow a hedged equity approach where you’re always invested, but again, always hedge for some of that downside risk mitigation. So with that, I’m going to go ahead and show you a couple of disclosure slides here and then thank you for your time. We hold these calls on a quarterly basis. If there’s anything that was left unaddressed by these slides, feel free to reach out and contact your regional representative and they’d be happy to answer any questions you might have. With that, thank you for your time.

Signing off.

(31:55.40)