Why has that happened and why should we care?

Sure.

Let me first welcome everybody as well and also mention we are happy to take audience questions.

I think there's an app that you can put in your questions.

And we really need this because if we run out of questions at the end, Ilan has threatened to show off the line dancing moves that he learned last night.

And trust me, nobody needs to see that.

Nobody wants to see that.

Are we still concerned about political interference with the Federal Reserve? Where are your thoughts in terms of very concerned versus not concerned at all? How are you thinking about that? It's a question that I get a lot from clients coast to

Hmm.

And they already had exceptional advisors.

So meeting the clients, understanding their situations, understanding the stories that they have are very important.

I think that more important than people perhaps give them credit for.

It's that every client that joins a firm has a personal story that has allowed them to get to a level of wealth that they can become a client.

And so whether it is their personal story of their professional career or entrepreneurship, whether it's the story of one generation removed, uh, oftentimes there's some type of entrepreneurial event that's associated with it.

Those are all such valuable stories.

[chuckles]

We're going to start with UDW.com. How should we be thinking about the world right now?

Wow.

So first of all, let me welcome everybody as well.

It's an incredible turnout and a beautiful place to be, and thank you for having us today.

There's a lot going on in the world.

We'll get to all of that.

I thought maybe I would start with a story, can I? Of course, yeah, yeah, please.

DW, how are you thinking about the fixed income side? How are you thinking about enhancing the income side of these portfolios?

Okay,

let's go ahead and get into it.

Static reports today still serve a very important purpose, but employer expectations are moving beyond those static reports and into more of a projection as to what is going to happen or what is starting to happen.

Basically what they need is reporting to help them manage their business in a proactive manner.

And this means doing three things extremely well.

First, it means helping control the costs by identifying those emerging costs and utilization patterns early enough to respond before they become a surprise during a renewal conversation.

Second, helping to improve those outcomes by connecting the utilization and program data so employer groups can start to see where earlier interventions may make a difference in the overall impact of the program upon the population.

But I'll let David go a little bit deeper as to how we do that together and the collaboration model that we built.

I mean, it's incredibly exciting that there's so much demand, essentially, for CapEx, for lending to companies to build out everything from AI centers to retooling themselves for a new era.

Let me stop you.

Okay.

The big question there that's facing the equity market is with all of that capex, with all of that build out, will it ultimately earn a return on the capital being invested? And that's a huge question mark because these numbers are into the trillions.

These are huge numbers.

And you can get anywhere from well actually that's going to pay off handsomely over time to this is all wasted capital and it's not going to come to anything and kind of anywhere in between.

And even if you got it right in terms of what the aggregate return on all this investment is going to be, It's not clear that the people who ultimately benefit will be the ones that people right now think are going to benefit.

Can you just sort of expand on that in light of actually what's going on in the yield story?

If you've had a Bigfoot sighting and would like to be a guest, please go to BigfootEyewitness.com and let me know.

My name is David Wolfe.

First, I want to thank Vic for allowing me on this show to talk about none other than Bigfoot, Sasquatch, whatever you want to call them.

So thank you so much, Vic, for having me.

And just to tell a little bit about myself, I live here in Owensboro, Kentucky.

I was born actually in Kashuk in Ohio, which we'll get to.

It's kind of one of the Bigfoot capitals of the United States.

21 plus terms and conditions apply.

And one of the most important lessons he told me was to learn to trust his instinct to trust.

My trust has been challenged a few times in my career, but I do trust people implicitly.

And my wife said to me once after a particularly difficult series of events where my trust was challenged, my wife said, you know, you're gonna have to not trust people as much in future.

And I said, well, I might as well hang up my boots and stop if I don't trust people.

And I said, you know, I'm gonna pay the price for trusting too much from time to time.

But over the course of my career, The benefit that I've got from trusting people so far outweighs a couple of times where my trust has been challenged that it's not even a close, you know, it's not even a close thing.

So, yeah, I do.

So I asked him to explain a little bit of how that magic happened, what was behind that incredible success, and how does knowing what worked in the past inform what he's doing now?

Nice

...

in that club.

So I was dealing with a very interesting couple of guys and, and they were very generous.

They taught me how to do the business.

I was writing songs, making a little bit of money every week, and learning the business of, of working with ad agencies and writing songs and, and creating music material for advertising purposes, marketing purposes.

And this is a business that at one time had, are you sitting down? About 20 writers like me, you know, doing-- I mean, he had 20 guys working for him, or women, combinations of people-

Yeah

So we pay attention to this, uh, most of us, only when it gets to a place like this, where the yields are high enough that we say, "Wait, what's going on?" What is it signaling to you that we see the 30-year treasury, especially in the US, at that level we haven't seen in several years, and before that, many, many years?

Well, as an asset manager and as a former central banker, I pay attention to this, uh, I guess a lot more than, than most folks.

Yeah, I mean, above 5% on the US long bond is, uh, raised a lot of red flags for folks.

Um, it's not a magic line.

Uh, yields, generally speaking, in the United States have been rising for the last couple of months or so, so it's not like a, a very different thing is happening.

But it is of concern broadly and of some concern to the equity market more generally.

[laughs] What does it suggest about what might happen next?

Well, I think equity markets are far more focused on earnings, and earnings have been great.

Right, right.

I decided, [laughs] I decided to take a, uh, a hike in an area that I know has high activity.

Um, and I haven't been there since end of January, early February, back when it was really cold out.

So I wanted to take a look before, you know, all the leaves get on the trees and everything up here.

And the weird thing was is when I was walking into an area that I'm very familiar with, um, I hear what is, like, big tree breaks and snaps, and it sounds like...

And I mean, this, this sounds like big trees snapping.

And h- it kinda, it kinda weirded me out at firstAnd I started walking in that direction.

[laughs]