This transcript was automatically generated.

Kathryn Toope: Welcome to Barenaked Money, the podcast where we strip down the complex world of finance to its bare essentials with your hosts, Josh Sheluk and Colin White, portfolio managers with Verecan Capital Management Inc.

Colin White: Welcome to the next edition of Barenaked Money. This is Colin with you with a very special guest, Lisa Kramer. I’m very proud and happy to announce that Verecan has taken the step of funding a research chair at the University of Toronto. So I’d like to introduce Lisa Kramer, whose official title is the Verecan Chair in Behavioral Finance at the University of Toronto. So welcome Lisa.

I’ll give a little bit of a context as to why we’ve gotten involved and I’ll be quiet and let the smarter person in the room do more of the talking. This is part of our goal to, you know, advance the conversation people are having around money and behavioural finance is something that is very important, that doesn’t get enough air and people don’t talk about it enough. So this is kind of our effort to bring it to the forefront audience and talk about some things that are very, very important and not well understood. So we just did our research and we found Lisa’s work and we’re very impressed with the body of work and the kind of work she’s been doing. So we wanted to get involved.

So Lisa, maybe you can describe a little bit about your background and how you got involved and why you got involved and take it from here.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Thanks. It’s really great to be here. And I’m so proud to be the inaugural chair in behavioral finance funded by Verecan. So thanks for having me. And I do work in the area of behavioral finance, which generally speaking takes insights from psychology and applies them to the context of economics and finance to try to better understand how people make financial decisions, all the interesting things they do, guided by their emotions and their impulses, sometimes costing them money.

We like to think about the financial aspect of the decisions people make, investors, as well as other financial market participants. So I’ve looked at even professionals in a whole wide range of financial context, different kinds of asset markets, individual decision making, aggregate market outcomes. And I’ve been working in this area since I was just a wee little PhD student, rebelling against the norms at the time and really happy that I kind of followed my nose and did what I thought was interesting because I still think it’s interesting. These days, a few more people also think it’s interesting. That’s validating.

Colin White: Well, that’s true. And maybe just for a second, we can geek out if you could just, you know, comment on the, you know, the differences behavior between behavioral finance and behavioral economics, are still relatively new ways of thinking and talking about stuff that is fighting against the establishment for recognition. I mean, was more familiar with behavioral economics, and I think that came a little bit before behavioral finance became became a thing. Maybe you can comment a little bit on on the playing field and like where this has all come from and where it’s maybe sitting today.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: For sure. So behavioral economics is just broader in behavioral finance. We narrow down into the financial aspects that are kind of a subfield of economics. So economics more broadly, if you’re looking at behavioral economics, you might see people doing experiments in developing countries, trying to see how you can combat poverty and get more people access to education, for example. In behavioral finance, we’ll look more at the decisions that households make about whether to spend or consume today and how investing aggregates up to help people in their retirement.

We’ll look at corporate finance context, the kinds of decisions that, you know, CFOs make and making decisions between debt and equity financing. And does human psychology play a role in those kinds of decisions? So it’s just a narrower slice, but behavioral economics and behavioral finance are definitely cousins.

Colin White: Oh, yeah. And I think that’s kind of what drew us to this because this is the maybe more applicable part when it comes to financial decision making for individuals. I think this is where we can make some progress and raising awareness. Now, again, sometimes you raise awareness with people and it doesn’t always help because if you really like chocolate, you’re going eat too much chocolate and maybe that’s outside of your control. But the hope is maybe we can point out some things to people to help them understand themselves a little bit more in their decision making.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Some chocolate is good. Like we don’t want people not to eat chocolate. And similarly, we don’t want people not to be human. Like we’re not aiming to turn people into robots. We’re humans, we have emotions, we have impulses.

We just want to understand when we act on those, what might happen and are we okay with that? Maybe sometimes we want to rein in the effects of some of those aspects of human nature, but it’s a bit of a trade off and we’re not aiming for perfection and there’s definitely nothing wrong with being human and having behavioral finance tendencies.

Colin White: And for the record, Veracan is in favor of humans and chocolate both. We’re anti neither. But it’s but it is an interesting thing. None of I think the topics lend themselves to really firm rulemaking per se. It’s more of a general awareness.

One of the things that I think and again, I’ve done a little bit of reading and research on some of your stuff, the work that was done on sunlight and how that affects general decision making and how that manifests itself in financial decision making. I think I found it very insightful from the perspective of understanding that if you think you’re a rational person, well, we’ve actually proven that how much daylight you’re getting is potentially going to influence how you make decisions. Maybe that’s not all rational. So there are things outside of your control. Is that a reasonably fair observation of that kind of work that you did?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: It started a couple of decades ago. We were interested in what kind of phenomena line up humans to behave in similar ways at certain points of the year. And we stumbled on the idea of seasonal depression. And of course, we’re humans, we absorb light through our eyes and that affects our hormone production and at the end influences our willingness to take financial risk as it happens, something we learned as we were doing. And, you know, with lots of people in a location, a hemisphere in fact, being aligned in their risk preferences, this can also align the kinds of securities we do or don’t want to hold.

And this really plays out in a huge way in just about every facet of financial markets, much to our surprise over decades of work. So, you know, it really is something that is pervasive. Just, you know, a fraction of people suffer extremely enough to be diagnosed with clinical depression due to these seasonal fluctuations in daylight exposure. But most of us, you know, maybe experience winter blues or something during the darker seasons. And most of us probably experienced some degree of changes in our risk preferences seasonally.

So this turned into a much huger project, set of projects really than we envisioned when we started the work.

Colin White: Were you able to establish a magnitude like this is a very marginal difference or were some of the results more dramatic than maybe one would anticipate?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: It’s huge. So if you think about the fact that the equity premium, you know, the reward you bear for holding securities that expose you to the market risk compared to safer securities like treasuries, you know, you might get a four or 6% equity premium. This effect amounts to about a 6% difference in the annual return you get in the darker seasons versus the lighter seasons. So huge in terms of magnitudes. And the way we sort of estimated this, we looked at a bunch of different countries and our hypothesis was that if daylight is affecting mood and risk preferences, then countries that are further away from the Equator should have bigger mood impacts and then bigger sort of behavioral impacts.

And indeed, we found for countries that are much further away from the Equator, Sweden, the effects were bigger. And then when you looked in the Southern Hemisphere countries, the effects were out of sync by six months, just like the seasons are. So that was an identifying set of tests that we’re validating. And when we did a little thought experiment using historical data, which isn’t always predictive of what’s going to happen in the future, but if we took a portfolio and invested it 50% in say Sweden and 50% in say South Africa, and compared the rate of return on that portfolio to one that moved the money seasonally to be a % at one extreme versus the other, The difference in those two portfolios was even bigger than 6% a year. So what can happen in any given year is anybody’s guess.

And I’m not trying to tell anybody to develop a trading strategy based on this. But, you know, over a long period of time, what we notice historically is very, very large seasonal effects.

Colin White: Well, yeah, and I guess I was going to chime in from the practical side of the world. I mean, because we’ve gone through, you know, a more intense globalization and the flow of capital around the world. So people of various geographic locations are investing in, you know, the the geographic boundaries are not quite the same. So and the other thing is if Russia invades Ukraine that morning, maybe that’s gonna be what moves the market that day rather than the fact that people are a little sad. So it’s always from a practical perspective.

And thank you for getting to this isn’t a trading strategy because that’s where I was going go. But I do think that has tremendous value to recognize that kind of magnitude in your own mood, you know, which I think is the kind of the goal or where I want to shine the light on. So, if we can make individuals aware that, you know, there’s very, strong proof that this does absolutely affect mood. Now, it’s not a trading strategy, to be clear, and make sure we don’t get in trouble or go to jail. But to be aware of that in making your own decisions, I think, is very, very important and something that really could make a difference in somebody’s situation.

Let me ask you an unfair question. What kind of strategies would you think would be effective to help somebody prevent the kind of fluctuations in optimism, if that’s the way to put it. What would you say to somebody who was trying to say, okay, what tools can I use to not have that affect me as much?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Sure. Well, I would start by saying, even if you’re tempted to try to reallocate your portfolio, even like within a geographic area, there’s still no like free lunch in this. It’s not like you can move your money between bonds and stocks at different times of the year and somehow outperform, because we do still observe that stocks are always riskier and always have on average a higher risk premium than government securities. So there isn’t even a market timing aspect to this within a geographic area. But beyond that, more to your question, I think recognizing that we’re human and anticipating that at certain times of the year, we might be really tempted to make big changes when we’re feeling more risk averse and bad economic news comes in, knowing that in advance and sort of strategizing ahead of time can be really helpful.

So one way to do that is like to develop a plan and stick to it, like not looking at your portfolio every time, you know, distracting things are happening in the news can be one coping mechanism. Another is if you find yourself to be really impulsive and prone to trading reflexively when things get frothy in markets, it can be helpful to have an intermediary between you and your portfolio. So a trusted advisor can be helpful to kind of walk you through those moments because, know, even if they’re also human, they do probably tend to look at your portfolio a bit differently than they would their own and probably take a longer term view on your portfolio because that’s in their professional best interest. So these are some of the things that come to mind.

Colin White: I guess what strings my mind is if I found myself in January or February not being very optimistic about things go wait a second am I really not optimistic about things or am I just in a bad mood? You know at least you know internally asking yourself for your July and August like hey I’m going to go swing for the fences. I’m feeling really optimistic right now. Again, maybe just wait a second. Is that really me talking or is that the sunshine talking?

No. I think it’s it’s tremendous the amount of work you you’ve done to quantify this and and and make make it a real thing because this is one of those ones that you could suppose as an issue. But until somebody such as yourself makes your colleagues and everybody else has worked on this work, puts the effort in to say, it’s a real thing. Now we can use that for awareness so people are a bit more aware that this is one of the effects they have and hopefully more properly aligns their confidence with their ability to behave as a rational human being. You’re not quite as rational as you thought.

What else are you thinking is interesting or what else from your your journey would you like to to talk about that would be helpful for people to maybe ponder themselves?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Yeah, I mean, I definitely wasn’t the first to do work in this area, behavioral finance or behavioral economics. There are just giants on whose shoulders I stand. And we could talk all day about some of the interesting results that have been done. You know, I came to the area kind of by accident myself. I just found myself disillusioned with the kinds of things I was learning in my PhD studies.

They were important building blocks, but they just weren’t really exciting to me. And I kind of got a little despondent about the idea of a career working on what was being done by most people at the time in academia. So I just kind of followed my own sense of what was interesting. And the first project that I worked on looked at daylight saving time changes and whether losing an hour or gaining an hour of sleep twice a year had any kind of influence on decision making in financial contexts. So we had read a book by Stan Coren.

He’s a UBC psychologist looking at just the impact of sleep on things like the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Challenger accident and three mile island accident and sleep and shift work and things like that were perhaps involved in those massive crises. And we just thought like, what about financial markets? And we took a look and sure enough, the trading day following a time change, there’s actually a big downturn in markets on average. Again, don’t want to predict what’s going to happen on any given day, but on average markets perform a lot worse on that first trading day after time changes. And, you know, we didn’t really test a specific mechanism, but what psychologists call sleep desynchronosis or changing our sleep patterns is associated with certain cognitive changes, maybe anxiety.

And so this could be what’s going on. But yeah, again, we were really surprised by the magnitude. When we looked at US markets on each trading day following a time change, there was in aggregate about a $30,000,000,000 loss in markets. And that seems to be standing the test of time just on average. Those those trading days tend to be not great.

Colin White: Yeah. And again, the reason that this doesn’t make a good trading strategy is that’s one of many forces at play in the market that day and other economic information can overtake the market in a very short period of time. So I want to keep saying that over and over again. I’m not for a second dismissing the value of what we’re talking about, but I just want to make sure nobody has got an opportunity to take a sound bite and say, hey, here’s a trading strategy. I want to make sure that they have trouble cutting me out of there saying it’s not a trading strategy.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: And to be clear, I also don’t pursue these as trading strategies. Like it’s just these are too risky to try to implement. It’s just academically, it’s interesting to try to understand what’s happened historically and think about psychological reasons that might happen. But absolutely, what’s currently going on in the economy can completely swamp these effects.

Colin White: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons that this doesn’t get as much play as maybe as it should is that it’s nuanced and nuanced conversations often get drowned out by less nuanced conversations. So what else is cool? What else is it? What else is happening?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: I’m working on a bunch of new research projects. It was exciting in the last twenty four hours because I actually worked on three different projects with three different sets of collaborators. Yesterday was a twelve hour day. And so it’s exciting at this stage of my career still to be working on things that I find interesting. And just like past work I’ve done.

It’s it’s all very eclectic. But yeah, definitely still actively researching different ideas. One of the papers that I was working on just in the last day, it’s still looking at seasonality in mood and financial markets. But this one is actually using high frequency data from financial markets. Like think of each order as it comes into the market, each trade as it happens.

We just have a decade of this high frequency data on every order that gets submitted, whether it’s executed or not. And what we’re looking to see is whether this behavioral seasonality in risk aversion is showing up in the cost of liquidity. We’re looking at the spreads between bid and ask prices and how these move around in time. And even though these kinds of markets are today really heavily dominated by algorithms, we’re still finding these human behavioral effects, which some people find surprising.

Colin White: So is that because humans design the algorithms or because there’s still enough human influence that the algorithms are reacting to the residue of human activity in the market? Is there any way to purse which that is, whether we’ve just created algorithms that we’ve given a seasonal affective disorder to?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Think there, yeah, I think there is some of that happening. I think that algorithms are created by humans and maybe as well, maybe a bigger factor could be that algorithms are often overridden by humans. So we do know that at these institutions that do a lot of the high frequency trading, they do often override what the programs say. And that’s a pretty great way to impart human tendencies into financial markets if you’re overriding your algorithms. And definitely, think the algorithms do also impart some bias as well.

Colin White: Well, I think for those afraid that the robots are about to take over, it’s probably still good that we override them every once in a while.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: I don’t think that robots are going to remove the behavioral from behavioral finance.

Colin White: Well, that is interesting because you would think that there is a school of thought that we can rationalize this away if we just get to a point where we let the system behave rationally. But I don’t think that’s the human condition. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to completely remove ourselves know, because these are so ingrained. And they’re again, we could go for days. You’ve you’re going a whole career just just looking at the different ways the human brain causes itself pain.

Well, interesting is it for you, I guess, that the proliferation of the available data? Like, are you finding that there’s more and more data that allows you to chase more and more interesting questions, or is the data too proprietary and too locked up for you to get access to what it is you’re looking to research?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: There is a lot of locked up data that would definitely be exciting to get my hands on. But I usually think of research ideas that I should be able to see just looking at markets. Like if they’re not there in aggregate, then I don’t know that I want to spend a lot of my time exploring them. So usually as a bit of a sniff test, I take a look to see what is just evident to the plain eye. And then we can throw some of the heavy duty econometrics of the question and maybe proprietary data if we can get our hands on it.

But as a first pass, I like looking at problems that are evident to the eye.

Colin White: Interesting. So what is the next question or what is the next thing that you are curious about that you’re allowed to talk about? I assume there’s some stuff that’s probably too new or too different or too currently locked up. But is there something else that’s on your desk that’s outside of the realm of the seasonal affective disorders and associated? Is there anything else that’s there?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: I think I’ve been just definitely working on projects that are sort of an extension of what I’ve worked on in the past for the most part, but I do dabble in other ideas. So one paper that has started a bit of a newer research stream for me, we published the first paper just last year, looking at the effects of racism basically and how it affects decision making by households. So there’s an area called household finance that’s very closely related to behavioral finance. We’re looking at the decisions that get made within the household about how to allocate money over time, you know, spending versus saving and questions about whether households participate in financial markets to sort of compound their saving over time and have more money available in retirement. My collaborators and I are looking at how different aspects of racism can influence the way different racialized communities don’t achieve as much as they could.

So the paper that we published last year looked at racialized police violence. And so think of those horrific stories that show up in the news once in a while, where an African American dies at the end of the police. We look at the people who live in that community and their race and the kinds of financial outcomes that they have subsequent to that traumatic event. And we can see differences in the way that they participate in financial markets to the detriment of the members of the African American community, for example. So in that paper, we looked at two of the biggest components of household wealth, which are retirement savings and your home.

And we saw adverse effects in both of those for the African American communities compared to the white community members where those events occurred. So that’s sort of a new stream of research for me. We’re continuing to look at some related questions there. It’s still very preliminary, some of the new work we’re doing. But there’s a lot of data available to investigate questions like these, and they haven’t been fully explored to the extent that I think they should be.

Colin White: Well, that’s really interesting. It’s like, you know, if there was some solid findings there, there probably would be some policy implications from, you know, that kind of work, which would be very exciting to see. And I guess just to understand it, because I’ve been witnessing and dealing with the general public. There are cultural differences with how different cultures deal with money. But I think more what you’re looking at is a racialized group, you know, inside an actual culture that is is experiencing the true effects of racism rather than just a cultural difference in how money is approached.

Is that a fair observation?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Yeah, absolutely. And in studies like this, we have to be really careful to properly control for the fact that different communities have different customs, different levels of trust in financial institutions. That’s been well documented by a lot of researchers. So we have to find clever ways to make sure that we’re not being fooled into finding a result by those kinds of well established tendencies. So that’s why these projects sometimes take years to complete.

Colin White: Well, absolutely. Because there’s always one more question once you if you’re truly curious, there’s always one more question, right?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Oh, yeah. And there’s always one alternative explanation that somebody points out that you didn’t think of that you have to make sure you carefully control for so that you’re not reaching, you know, unsupported conclusions.

Colin White: Interesting. And I think you made a comment or I read something that you’re also looking at the effect of even natural disasters on different communities and the effect that that had in the subsequent decision making for a period of time. Is that something that I read accurately or am I misremembering something?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: That might be the next recipient of the Verekan Chair in Behavioral Finance. That’s certainly work that I’ve read about, but I haven’t myself looked at natural disasters. In some of my work, we’ve controlled for different types of weather phenomena, but it’s usually like whether it’s been snowy or rainy or cloudy, but there’s some great work that’s been done looking at natural disasters for sure.

Colin White: What would you would you comment on the problem of overconfidence and and decision making? Is that something that’s come close to your your world as far as taking a look at as a contributor to poor decision making? Know, somebody who has too much confidence in making their decisions that they think they have full information and proceed with too much confidence, is that a thing?

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a huge thing and it can be very detrimental to one’s portfolio to be under the influence of overconfidence. So when I teach behavioral finance, we have various tests for various types of overconfidence, and it’s always kind of fun in the classroom to have students, you know, explore their own degree of overconfidence and then kind of document that 70% of the class thinks that they’re an above average driver, for example, which is one of the easy ways to show overconfidence. And then looking at the kinds of detrimental effects that this can have at the portfolio level. So some studies in finance have shown I’m thinking of the work of Terry Odean and Brad Barber, who were really the first in this area, they showed that overconfident investors measured by how frequently they trade tend to underperform other traders.

So when discount brokerages first became available, they got ahold of the data and they could look at how frequently every investor traded. And basically the ones that trade too much, they think that they’ve got great information and they’re trading, you know, every time they think they’re buying low and selling high. And maybe they are, usually they’re not. But even so, all the fees that they were paying in commissions, you know, end up eating away at their return. And so on average, they ended up underperforming relative to everybody else.

So that’s that really hits the bottom line.

Colin White: Well, yeah. And, you know, I always challenge people who are, you know, behaving over confidently. It’s like you you understand the game you’re in. Like, you know, the smartest minds of the world have put trillions of dollars to work and they trade in increments of picoseconds. And you read The Globe this weekend and you think you have information that you can trade on that nobody else has figured out.

Optimistic might be a way to describe them. But, you know, again, it’s it’s it’s part of the human condition. I and I guess part of the problem is the world kind of panders to that. Like, there’s, Thaler was quoted on a podcast I listened to one time that it’s way more profitable to take advantage of somebody’s weakness than to fix them. And the industry, think really, you know, the world.

And I don’t think this is a financial industry thing specifically, but, know, just panders to that. Like, it’s like, I know what I’m doing. Sure you do. Here’s a trading account. And you know they let there’s just a lot more work to turn that people or that person around and say no no you don’t know what you’re doing.

That’s a lot of work and you may piss them off and you know that that’s not the way. There’s all these opportunities that kind of feed into those things that we get to watch regularly.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Absolutely. And you see some of the new trading platforms that are using gamification to really exploit people, you know, gamification in and of itself doesn’t have to be inherently good or bad. You know, gamification can be used to promote investor education, like give people badges for learning more. But no, we we have confetti when people make a trade and incentivize people to trade frequently and do things that aren’t necessarily in their best interest. And it’s really disheartening to see.

Colin White: The advice we always give people is just understand the business model of where you are. Like if you’re in the room and you didn’t pay to be there, you’re the product now. Just as long as you understand that, that’s the first step to protecting yourself. So if you’re in that room, you didn’t pay to be there and they’ve got a gamification system running, that’s in their best interest. Somehow they’re not doing that for free.

They’re doing that because they’re getting a return on it. Like some of these free trading platforms for sure are very, very good at, you know, again, the confetti thing or here’s top five traded stocks. Here’s the top five growth stocks. Here’s and they just produced endless lists. And I believe the research has been pretty conclusive that that will influence trading frequency and what people will will buy based on it’s a popular list and people want to take part in it.

Have you seen a good example of gamification that is for the forces of good? I’m kind of curious because you’re right. It could absolutely be used for the forces of good, but in my my professional career, I’ve never seen what I would call really good gamification trying to promote good behavior for for the average investor.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: Yeah. I haven’t really seen it deployed by any for profit company. It’s usually proposals from government adjacent groups, like nudge groups that are trying to deploy behavioral kinds of concepts to promote good decision making that usually comes from the nonprofit sector. You know, they have great ideas, but then you try to get companies to implement these sorts of things. And all of a sudden, they ask, well, how are we going to make money from this?

Colin White: Yeah, they engage for the virtue signaling aspect. I was, I guess we’re very concerned about this. We’re talking with these people, but when push comes to shove, I guess maybe that’s the inevitable problem they’re going to run into. But I think it’s something that really, really could make a difference if there was a way to to get that, you know, that kind of reinforcement and get those kind of dopamine hits for doing the right thing, in a system. But I’d be kind of curious.

We’ll do this offline. You could point me in the direction of some of that research, I’d be very interested to see if there was, you know, what is there and try to participate in a solution as to where that could be used and try to find a way to get that out there.

Dr. Lisa Kramer: The way some institutions, I shouldn’t like throw every institution out with the bathwater, but like there are some subtle nudges that that many companies have started using, like setting up automatic transfers into retirement accounts and things like that so that you are remembering to save every month without having to actually take any action, sort of automating things like that. But that’s pretty low hanging fruit and it’s not gamification, which is what you asked about.

Colin White: Yeah, oh, was interesting. Well, fair enough. Well, I tell you what, why don’t we leave them anymore And I’ll I’ll I’ll say thank you very much for this. And and I listen. I I want to give you full credit, because I know when we called you initially to approach you about having this conversation, you might have thought we were crazy because this is a completely new idea as far as I can tell.

And you’ve shown an immense amount of courage to to engage with, you know, us on this topic. We’re looking forward to working with you to try to elevate the conversation and maybe get away from some of the other conversations that’s occupying everybody’s mind right now that’s maybe not as productive. Thank you very much.

Colin White: If you’re breaking a sweat trying to figure out what your financial advisor is talking about, you’re not getting the service you need. You probably hate trying to get an answer from them, but you also think moving your accounts will be a headache, and it might be. But working with don’trocktheboatwealthplanning.com or .ru isn’t exactly stress free, is it? Call us. We will demystify the world for you.

Kathryn Toope: For more information on the subject of today’s podcast or any other financial topic, please visit us online at verican.com. That’s verecan.com. There’s plenty of information there, or you can reach out to someone on the team. Thanks for listening. Please note, the information provided in this podcast is for general information purposes only.

It is not intended as financial investment, legal tax, accounting, or other professional advice. Our discussions are not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to make any specific investments. Any decisions, based on information contained in this podcast, are the sole responsibility of the listener. We strongly advise consulting with a professional financial adviser before making any financial decisions. Listeners should be aware that investing involves risks and that past performance is not indicative of future results.

Barenaked Money is produced by Verecan Capital Management Inc, a licensed portfolio management company in Canada. We operate under the regulatory framework established by the provincial securities commissions in the provinces within which we operate. The views expressed in the podcast are our own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any regulatory authority. Remember, at Verecan Capital Management Inc, we focus on aligning our goals with yours, prioritizing integrity and transparency. For more information about us and our services, please visit our website.

Thank you for listening, and let’s continue to challenge the norms of the financial services industry together.