Managing Risk Through Market Badness With Rob Isbitts

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How should investors manage risk in the midst of volatile markets? Rob Isbitts explains why what’s happening now is part of a process (2:00). How markets are evolving and why technical analysis is important (4:50). Dividend investing – but not at any cost (9:15). How to think about options and managing risk (18:30). Examples of using the dog collar approach (30:45).

Transcript

Rena Sherbill: Rob Isbitts, always great to talk to you. Leader of Sungarden YARP Portfolio, writing under Sungarden Investment Publishing. Welcome back to Investing Experts. Always great to have you.

Rob Isbitts: Rena, it is so great to be with you, and, wow, what a great time to be talking about markets. The NCAA is gearing up for March Madness as we record this, and the stock market’s already a few rounds into March badness.

RS: Oh, he’s got them all ready, folks. I was gonna say nothing closer to madness than the insanity that the market finds itself in or that I imagine investors are feeling about themselves and their choices.

I’m all for grounding us in the current moment and providing, hopefully, some hope, but certainly some context and certainly some value and certainly some guidance into how to approach these volatile and uncertain markets.

How are you thinking about these markets? How are you finding yourself thinking about your strategy given where we’re at these days?

RI: I think we can sum it up this way. I was driving around just yesterday, and my wife points out to me that there is a car in front of us, and here is the license plate. (SPY) (QQQ) with the space in between. That was the entire plate.

RS: No way.

RI: I am not kidding.

RS: My goodness. Living right when the signs are all pointing to you.

RI: What we used to say decades ago is, oh, when the taxi cab drivers in New York City are giving you stock tips, okay, you know you know it’s run a little bit too far.

But I would say this, Rena. You know, I think that everything that’s happening now is part of a process. It’s not like it just happened. And and, yes, people can point to, oh, it’s the tariffs this, it’s the inflation that, it’s the unemployment that.

I mean, there’s a million different reasons. But it doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s just, if you will, the pin that pricks the bubble.

And I think a lot of it, and this is really what I try to do in a lot of my writing and especially in the Investing Group now, is to educate people about how markets behave today, what influences them, what they reward, and what they punish.

And I would say the two biggest factors that are constantly front of mind for me, and I’m trying to get this out to the people who are kinda frozen in the same old sort of TV headline narratives and stuff, and, oh, you know, stock picking and all that stuff. I’ll get to that in a minute.

But the two big monsters out there, and they’re not necessarily scary, you just have to understand them. One is what I would call indexation, and that means there’s so much money now in the S&P 500 and even in the Nasdaq 100 index funds. And the whole market tends to move in sync with them or most of it does anyway, especially when things go straight down or straight up.

And, in fact, I’ve even written a little bit recently about some socks that I think are potentially masquerading as yes, they’re actual public companies, and they have great businesses. But as far as their stock prices go, because there’s a big difference between a company and its business and the stock behavior, a lot of those are really just moving like index funds. And actually, a lot of them are worse.

So the other factor is algorithms, algorithmic trading. And, I mean, we can talk about that. I’ve talked about it, I think, quite a bit, written about it a lot.

But those are the big ones. Indexation and algorithms, they make the stock market a very different arena than we are used to, and it doesn’t mean that fundamental analysis and stock picking is forgotten and gone. Absolutely not.

However, it now has company, and I think we have to make room for other things. This is why I’ve been a technician for so long and why technical analysis, at least the way I do it, a little bit different than the way most people do is so much more valuable, I think, today and almost essential to at least understand. And, you know, that’s kinda what I’m about.

RS: And you’ve been on before talking about this conversation and this notion of how the markets are evolving and how investors need to adapt to this new reality that we’re in.

Share with us why technical analysis is so salient to your approach and in general that you think it should be used.

RI: The market tells us a story all the time. That’s how I see it. And, no, I’m not some market whisperer or anything like that.

But I will say this, especially now, everything that can be known publicly is pretty much known, disseminated, processed very, very quickly. So what I try to figure out by pouring through probably hundreds of charts a day, thousands a week, and millions since I started way back.

I think I’ve told the story. I was 16 years old, growing up in New Jersey. My dad was a do it yourself investor, never professional, and he was charting stocks and taught me to do it with a pencil and graph paper. 16 years old.

So forty four years later, you know, here we are, and and I’m doing it professionally. I mean, dad’s been gone for a little while, but, you know, I’m trying to teach other people, and it’s not about charting is the only thing.

It’s just very complementary. And I look at price analysis. That’s really what it is. It’s analysis of price, price trends, markets have a memory, and guess who is using them more than anybody?

The algorithms and the hedge funds and the high frequency folks. So when you’re sitting there on days like we’ve had recently and you see, oh, I just went to go get a sandwich. I come back and the market’s just dropped half a percent. You know, sometimes it’s news driven, but the news is only the stimulus, the actual price action.

And again, I say markets have a memory. I mean, I used to do this with the folks who would intern with us back when I was an advisor. We would draw the lines on the charts and say, okay. Logically, this is where it ought to stop falling, take a breath, and decide what’s gonna happen next. And they’d be like, how did you know that?

Because this is how the market thinks now. So of all these new elements that I think a lot of investors, either they don’t understand or they acknowledge, but they say, that didn’t really matter. And I think it not only matters, it drives my decision making, and it’s really what I call the when.

I have three phases in my stock selection, ETF selection, hedging process. The first is what, as in what am I going to buy or consider buying at a price?

And I call that my watch list. It’s a bunch of stocks and some ETFs. And I write about a lot of them, and, obviously, the Investing Group folks see it all live in my actual research deck that I track. We share it with them. That’s the what.

But just because I like something, it doesn’t mean this is the when. The when is determined mostly by technicals because I’ve already had the stocks and the ETFs sort of pass muster, if you will.

And then after that, something I think we’ll get into before we’re done here is what I would call the how. I’m doing a lot of work with options. I always have, but I found them particularly useful in this environment for a lot of reasons. And sometimes as a surrogate for exposure long or bearish. A lot of times, kinda combining with stocks or ETFs. So summarizing that, there’s the what, the when, and the how.

And I never expect anybody to just do what I do, but I think to have a what, a when, and a how, and make it your own, I think that’s what do it yourself investing is about, and I learned that a long time ago.

RS: We just had this Dividend Investing Forum, and you were talking about the importance of dividend paying stocks and how yield figures into your strategy. Steven Cress has been highlighting dividend paying stocks in this environment.

How would you share with investors the I guess, they could be the what, it could be the how, but how do you play this market or what is worth keeping in mind when sussing out how to play this market?

RI: It’s funny because obviously, I like to be a dividend investor. I’d like to be an income investor primarily, but not at any cost. And that, I think, is where I disagree with a lot of the, let’s call it legacy tenured folks that I see in the dividend space.

And it’s why I use now something called a dog collar, which I think we’ll probably talk about. I didn’t invent it, but I guess the the dog part maybe I invented.

I look at dividend stocks now and I say, okay. They don’t yield as much as they used to. The S&P, I think, is yielding half as much as it used to. There aren’t a lot of stocks that yield significantly more or most don’t even yield close to T-bills.

So you have to have some price upside and not just collect the dividend or even in a diversified portfolio of “high yielders”, you’re gonna be somewhere with four handles, we say. A four something percent yield if you can even get that.

And that is the market kinda being a victim of its own success. You know, we have had a good decade overall. Now a lot of it was driven by companies that don’t pay a lot of dividends, Mag 7 and all. But companies are also doing different things with their cash. They’re buying back stock a lot more.

So I look at it and I say, okay. I don’t wanna force the income if it means that my total return has a possibility of being decidedly negative, perhaps over the next few years, and I think that’s a real possibility.

So what I would say to anybody who says, okay. My mission is to find dividend stocks. Yeah. Mine is too. But I think that we need to separate what I would call stock picking, and in a traditional way we think, into risk management having a much bigger role in any process.

It is what drives mine. It is frankly, I think, what drives people to read my stuff at all because I was born a risk manager. I mean, I mentioned my late father. The other thing I’ll tell you is that he grew up in New York City during the great depression. And those bloodlines run pretty solidly.

I think more about how much I can lose, and then I wanna make as much as I freaking can, but not until that’s been taken out. I mean, I’m semi retired and and I don’t wanna take a big step backward. I think a lot of people feel that way or they start to feel that way.

Maybe they started on February 19. Right? Because, just like five years ago, that’s the exact date that the market started to to roll over. And look, we don’t know if this is just another false alarm.

But I will say this. I don’t know if a lot of investors have a strategy. And let’s talk about the dividend investors. Stay on that. I get it that you can just keep the dividends coming in and the dividends will grow and all that.

I do not subscribe to that. I respect anybody who wants to do it that way. I would just never do it that way because I’ve been through too many market cycles.

So I think of it this way, and I’m happy to say it’s playing out even this year. It certainly played out very well in 2020 when I actually made money in that five week downdraft, 34% in the S&P in five weeks.

But I look at it this way. Everybody can play offense, but very few investors today, especially if they’re new, they haven’t had to play defense because every time you had a market drop, it’d come right back. Right? 2020, 2022, 2018 was almost down 20%.

We had a little foray with that, especially for dividend stocks in 2016/2017. I was running a dividend stock mutual fund. And what saved it at the time were the hedges I put around the dividend stocks. And that’s kind of how I differentiate.

I will go and try to get that yield, but, wow, I do not wanna make 4 or 5%, if I’m lucky, on dividend yield, if I’m not going to feel very confident that I’m also gonna make more than that. Maybe not consistently, but certainly out of the gate. So buying something new, it really has to pass a high bar.

So to me, risk management is an essential part of income investing, and I don’t mean just defending against interest rates and inflation. I mean against, like, pure price loss because, again, you got those two monsters out there.

You’ve got the algorithms, and you’ve got the indexing effect. In fact, 90%, I believe, I’ve heard 65, 75. I’ve also heard I think JPMorgan did a study a few years ago. 90% of market trading volume these days is by indifferent investors.

You know what I mean by indifferent? Well, they have a strategy, but the strategy has nothing to do with what a lot of us sit here in front of our computers all day, well, should I buy this or not?

So an index fund and this is something a lot of people don’t necessarily understand about ETFs because they’re still relatively new to a lot of people. When an index ETF gets a lot of money in, the manager, and they’re human managers, okay, with a lot of computer aided, but the manager will decide, okay, how do I get my index fund in balance?

If I just got a lot of money in or I had a lot of money go out, I have to get back to my weightings, which means I need to have a lot of NVIDIA (NVDA) and Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT) and, not a whole lot of the bottom 300, 350 companies.

So they’re not they don’t care what they’re buying. They’re just doing what they’re supposed to do. And this has created a very top heavy market because of all that index investing. It just means that 6, 7% of every dollar that goes into the index goes into each of those three big stocks I just named.

That’s 20% right there. And, it just changes changes the nature of all this. And, again, the algorithmic trading also. An algorithm does not know. It just knows I saw this word, Powell said this, whatever. And, yes, a lot of that is just chaotic stuff that goes away, but there’s always something. They used to call this program trading. I haven’t heard of that term a lot lately.

But the idea is, I think investors today, especially our crowd at Seeking Alpha, the do it yourself investor, who’s worked hard to get here and, yeah, they wanna grow it, but boy, they wanna keep it.

To me, understanding who else is in the room with you. It’s like going to a party and really having no idea who these other people are and maybe not even knowing where you are. And to me, if you don’t understand those things, then you’re at a disadvantage.

And that’s why, again, I go back to the charts really help me, always have, to figure out that story that is being told by these many actors, including the traditional ones, and why risk management in many different forms is my priority as an investor.

RS: So talk to us exactly about how you construct your portfolio and and what the barometers for entry are in terms of stocks getting in.

I’m also curious. It’s obvious why we need to manage our risk right now. Right? The markets are volatile. People don’t know what’s going on. Investors aren’t sure what may make the best play.

But also, there’s a swath of investors primarily on the younger side, but not just, that are interested in having risky takes on the market, and they’re confident in their picks.

I’m curious about what you mentioned about the index funds as it pertains to the ETFs. Are you advocating or are you saying that stock specific investing is a smarter approach because you’re saying that it’s allocated towards those big stocks at this point? Or is price coming into play there as a reason not to get into specific stocks?

Maybe share with investors a bit more concretely about how people that are more excited about risk should be thinking about risk management, and then also as it pertains to your strategy concretely how it works.

RI: That’s a great way to take this discussion. Let’s talk about and I’ll relate it to things I’m doing in in a couple minutes.

There’s a lot of ways to manage risk, but I want to separate. There are, I would say, three concepts that I think can very much get confused. There’s risk management. When people hear risk management, they think, oh, okay. Well, I don’t want that because I won’t make as much money. Wrong.

Because now if the market goes straight up for another fifteen years with only periodic breakdowns that recover right away because everybody buys the dips, if that’s the way it’s gonna be for the next five, ten years still, risk management might shave a little bit off of your return, but it might not.

If the markets are anything other than what we’ve had, then to me, the way you get to the best long term return is by ABL, avoid big loss. And big is defined by the investor. It could be 5%, 10%. It could be 50%. Everybody is different, and, yeah, that’s kinda what I try to help folks figure out.

So there’s risk management. Then there’s market timing. Which, by the way, everything has timing in it. There’s a reason that index funds rebalance on the quarter. Why on the quarter? Why not every six months? Why not every month? Why not every six weeks? There, it’s not so much a timing element. You know what? I’m gonna talk about this in a second.

So there’s risk management. There’s market timing, and then there’s, oh, you’re just a perma bear managing risk all the time. No. And let me explain some forms of risk management.

Now, obviously, you know, everybody knows what cash and bonds are. Okay? They give you different types of returns, especially cash. You might avoid the losses with stocks, but you’ll miss out on the gains. With bonds, you’re moving away from stocks. Although these days, a lot of times, they they tend to correlate.

But you have price and credit risk. Everybody kinda knows those at least at a surface level. So I wanna talk about the the more nuanced ones that are very important to me.

One is position sizing. So the thing that I wish I would see more of, because I end up talking about this a lot with people in the comment sections on the articles. Maybe I’ll put out an article and people say, well, do you have a buy on it?

Well, let’s see. My normal stock position is anywhere from 1-5%. I own 1% of this. Is that a buy? Technically, I own it. But am I really going all in as if it were for a 5 or even maybe a little bit higher percent? No.

I would almost say in addition to the what, the when, and the how, there’s the how much. And I’ll get to that in a sec. There’s a lot of ways that we can do this. You can position size, and that’s a way to reduce risk.

If you and I both own the same set of stocks, but I own 2% in each of them and you own 4% in each of them, and let’s say there’s 25 stocks, you’re taking twice as much risk, but we own the same stuff. So that’s one aspect. Position sizing is something I wish folks would maybe give a little more consideration to.

The second thing is what I would call tactical management. And, again, that’s as a technician, it’s a little bit easier for me to do. Some people will do it based on fundamental levels. I’ll buy it at this PE ratio, but I don’t wanna own it at this higher PE ratio, that type of thing.

But the ones I think are really making a difference for me and, I think anybody who follows my work, is when we start to include things like options. Yes, there’s also things like levered and inverse ETFs.

As I see it, Rena, do I really care if the market goes up or down? I really don’t. I mean, it’s easier when it goes up and it usually goes up. But if I’m only built to make money when the market goes up, then I’m not really investing. I’m just kinda tagging along. You know what I mean?

There’s only so much stock picking that you can do these days because of those big factors that I talked about, which are making too many stocks and parts of the market move in sync with each other.

So what I’ve been doing a lot more of is using options in a few very simple ways. I don’t speak the Greek stuff nearly as well as other people do. But here’s an example. Taking the risk out of taking risk. That what I would call this.

And it gets a little bit tougher when volatility goes up because that affects option prices in different ways and probably another subject for another day. But let’s say that I found a a stock that I like.

Actually, I did this with gold recently in Sungarden YARP Portfolio. I bought a gold ETF, but I didn’t buy the ETF. I bought call options on the ETF. I spent a fraction of the money I would have, so I’m putting less money at risk. I mean, it was I think it was maybe a half a percent of my portfolio, probably even less. I was just starting.

I did the same thing with small caps except I was buying put options on at the time, (IWM), the small cap index.

So, basically, I was gold bullish and small cap bearish. And they both worked out to different degrees. The small cap really worked out and the gold a little bit, but here was the idea.

I’m gonna risk, let’s say and without getting too mathy here. Let say it’s at a half a percent of my portfolio, and I am buying call options on gold. Well, how much can I possibly lose? I can only lose what I put up. I can lose a half a percent, a half percent of my portfolio.

What are other ways to lose a half a percent of a portfolio? Well, I can own a stock at 5% of my portfolio, and it can go down 10%. Same thing. However, if the stock craters one day on earnings and it’s down 20 or 25%, a stop order won’t help me.

So in other words, what I’ve done is I’ve achieved my exposure, and there’s some trade offs, a little bit of cost, and the way I do it, you usually need to go up more than a few percent. So you kinda give up the first few percent. But you’re defining your downside, and that is so important to me, and I wanna do it whenever I possibly can.

So those are sort of two versions that I jumbled together there, what I would call the protective put option hedge. You get the loss control, a little bit of cost, and the call options, I would call it a surrogate long position. You get all the upside, but you are capped in terms of time. If the option goes out three months, then that’s the time you have unless you wanna roll it over.

But what sometimes happens with these things, and, again, to tell a war story from the Sungarden YARP Portfolio, the gold worked out okay. The small cap worked out so well that because I started into it right before things started really rolling over for small caps.

Within a week, I think I had doubled that little bit of money. And then what did I do? Well, I still saw a downside. Why? Because I chartered it, and I have other opinions about small caps, which I write about or we can talk about why they’re less competitive these days.

The first put option resulted in a nice little gain. I took the gain. I put it in my pocket, and I took – actually, the other way around. I put the original investment in my pocket. I took the profit, and I rolled it out into something at a lower strike price level. Again, I don’t wanna get to jargony here, but the bottom line is I’ve never risked that much money in these situations.

They are side positions to a core portfolio of dividend stocks, ETFs, cash, etc. So those are all sort of some quick examples of these things.

The one that I think will bring it all together, if you’ll indulge me here, is what I’ve been writing about more frequently and have never had more positive feedback from the comment section than I have about this.

And that is called, at least I call it the dog collar. Look, an option collar, these have been around for a long time, but the options market is so liquid. I mean, some parts of it are probably dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

When I use options, I’m using them in what I would call a very meat and potatoes way. I’m using them because I just want something very simple. And as it turns out, options are a great tool to do that. So let’s talk about the dog collar.

Why even consider using options when I can just buy stocks or ETFs? I want as much upside as I can possibly get. But more importantly, in this market environment and probably for a while, especially the stocks. Every stock I own right now has some type of option work around it. Typically, this dog collar.

So first, what is a dog collar? Well, a collar is an option collar is where, simple example: There’s a hundred dollar stock. You buy put options that say if it goes below $95, you can sell it at $95 from now until the time the option expires. Let’s say it’s six months from now. So in the next six months, I can sell it for $95.

I got a little ticket that says I can sell it for $95, and the options market will be there to help me cash it in. That costs a little money, and I’d rather defer the cost a little bit. And I think the stock, again, through my chart work, it all gets driven by the charts. Let’s say over the next six months, I can see the stock going up, at most maybe 15%. So I can sell call options about 15% up.

So I basically create a collar on a hundred dollar stock for the next six months. And there’s all kinds of variations, but basic example. So I basically locked into a range of 95 and 115 on a hundred dollar stock.

If the stock goes below 95, I don’t care. I can sell it at 95. I’m just kinda wasting time hoping you can get back. And I can always adjust it at that point and effectively cash out for 95.

And I have a few examples of these for you. If the stock goes all the way up, the first thing people say to me and I get this all the time in the comment section and I kind of respond right back. Well, but if the stock goes to a 120, 130, and you’re capped out at 115, that stinks.

Well, first of all, I feel like a winner because I just made 15% in less than six months. And secondly, there’s no law against buying more stock, buying call options. There’s so many different ways.

And, again, this would take a whole another episode probably. And I’m putting as a matter of fact, we have a link that people can get to, may put in the show notes or something where I kinda walk through this this this whole thing.

So the dog collar, the only reason I call it a dog collar is it’s a regular option collar. And even though I could technically apply it to any stock or ETF that has a liquid options market, what I’m particularly looking for in this market, and this tells you where I’m going and why I’m not big on the yield stocks just for the sake of yield.

A lot of stocks have been in trouble, and a lot of other stocks are in trouble. So what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to be a contrarian investor in the most classic way that I typically am. And so I’m looking for stocks that are not flying higher. I’m looking for the dogs.

I’m looking for the, I don’t know, 12 or 13 Dow stocks that haven’t made money in three plus years. By the way, S&P 500, since the beginning of 2020 I’m sorry, 2022. Since the beginning of 2022, a very large portion of the S&P 500, the stocks are down, or they’re about flat or they haven’t made a lot of money less than T-bills. So this idea that the stock market has been roaring, no. Probably about 50 to 100 stocks have been some degree of roaring.

Here are a few examples. I’m gonna give you one that worked, one that failed miserably, quote, unquote, and you’ll see why I love this approach, and one that’s kinda flat so far.

So the one that worked, was (CCI). Specialized REIT. There’s a few others that look pretty interesting, but this one looked really good. Wonderful chart pattern. Know the company well enough. Remember, I’m not a fundamental analyst per se, but I follow Seeking Alpha Quant factor grades, I like those a lot.

And I get a lot of inputs. And, obviously, I’ve been doing this for almost forty years. So CCI, it’s on my watch list. It had already satisfied the what, and now it was the when in the chart. But then I had to get to the next step, which is how.

How am I gonna buy it? Well, there is no stock I see right now that other than a very small trading position, I’ll do that all the time, but in terms of a serious position, like going and putting three, five, six percent of my portfolio in a single stock, I’m not doing it without a net.

And so what I did is with CCI, I actually didn’t even complete the collar just yet. I bought the stock. I bought some put options on it so that my net loss is very skinny. The stock’s up about 11% in a fairly brief amount of time.

The puts have shaved off 1% of that. So I would say that one’s working so far because I made 11 in a short amount of time, but I’ve netted 10 because if something had happened to trash the stock, I’m not a future predictor. So I am not sitting here trying to think that I know where every stock is gonna go.

I think the odds are in my favor, and I have a new sort of system I put out and make it available to people to gauge how confident I am in a particular name. But bottom line is anything can happen to any stock at any time.

So I like the 11 to net 10, and I haven’t completed the collar yet, so I could go sell call options at some point and probably make up for that cost.

Again, these are all in progress. The one that failed miserably is Novo Nordisk (NVO). Obviously, they’ve been in the middle of the whole weight loss thing.

That was one. I had that. I had Merck (MRK) recently, and they both kinda turned out the same way. I was like, okay, this is a chart that’s either going to bottom really nicely or it’s gonna bust through.

I would never buy the stock alone. However, I will take a shot with a modest amount of my portfolio as long as I have a collar around it. So what’s happened with Novo Nordisk? Since I bought it, the stock is down 12%.

But when you mix in my options and give me the whole position, I’m down five. I can handle being down five. And you know what? If the stock goes down instead of 12%, if it goes down 42%, 52%, I can’t lose more than five.

I’m already locked in. So, like, with Merck, I already went and readjusted the collar to lower my upside. And I don’t wanna get into too many entanglements here with the options, plus this is also very visual. That’s why we’ve been putting out videos on it. So we have an 11% gainer that nets to 10 so far. And I still own all these as of this recording anyway.

You know, NVO is down 12, but I’m only down five. The other one, which is gonna happen a lot in a market kind of figuring out what to do, and that’s Procter and Gamble (PG). The stock is up 1%. I’ve got a very slight gain, so kinda flat.

Again, the upside is limited to either not at all, if I don’t sell a call option. Or it is limited to the call option, the price that it struck for the time it’s enforced, but I can always get more upside. There’s a million ways to get more upside. I’ve kinda talked about that before.

And if the stock crashes, I’ve already decided the moment I bought the stock based on putting the option together, the option collar together, the dog collar, that if this dog still has fleas sometime after I have bought it, I already have decided how much I’m willing to lose.

And look, you have buffer ETFs and you have covered call ETFs, and they’re very, very popular. And they have billions and billions I mean, like, hundreds of billions of assets in them.

And honestly, I guess my message to the do it yourself investor and the Seeking Alpha audience and beyond is if you can construct your own dog collar, especially with a little bit of education provided, why go and get part of that, still have downside, buffers have downside that that surprises people. Covered call ETFs have a lot of downside because all you need is for the market to fall faster than those little monthly dividends are coming in.

What good is getting $2, $3 a month even in dividend if the portfolio goes down 20% in in a couple of months. So to me, the math is just kind of against it. So I like having more control over this, and I think that’s why we’re getting such a great response in the comment section and, yeah, in the IG, for this dog collar concept. It’s not like I invented it. I’m just bringing in front and center at, I think, a pretty timely moment.

RS: Sounds like it. So that Investing Group for listeners interested or wanting to find out more, it’s called Sungarden YARP Portfolio. Rob’s free articles are written under Sungarden Investment Publishing on Seeking Alpha.

Rob, anything else to share with investors that we left out of this conversation?

RI: Well, just give you a quick coming attractions. Just released this actually last night or today. We do a live thing with the subscribers, once a week. So, I’m gonna talk about it. I have something that I’ve written about in Seeking Alpha, but it was in a very narrow scope. It’s called the ROAR score, reward opportunity and risk.

And it’s really me taking my technical work from all these years and boiling it down into answering a single question that I think, especially now, most investors would wanna know.

Is the next ten percent move in this stock or ETF likely to be up before it’s down or down before it’s up? 10% either way, which one happens first? And what I do is the ROAR score for stocks and ETFs, just like I’ve done for the S&P for a few years, is a gauge that says, okay, a 70% chance or this one has a 20% chance. It’s never gonna be 0. It’s never gonna be 100. But somewhere in there. And I’m gonna be writing and showing a lot more of this, and I’m very interested to see if it’s useful to people because it sure is to me.

RS: Awesome. Good stuff. And anywhere else investors can find your work, or are those the two main places?

RI: I love the Bar Chart system for technicals along with Seeking Alpha, stuff that’s on that site. And so I do a little bit of work for Bar Chart as well, and I use a lot of their tools. And so, that’s another place. I think it pairs up very well with what I’m doing over here. But, no. Those are those are main places. Sungardeninvestment.com is our website on Substack, and we’re fairly active there too.