What Brexit Means for Your Investment Portfolio – Episode 29

Great Britain’s referendum to leave the EU triggered an historic week for financial markets and drove significant losses for some investors. There’s no shortage of speculation about “Brexit’s” long term ripple effect and the timeline for recovery. In this episode of Dentist Money™, Reese & Ryan share reaction from some of the financial industry’s top advisors and offer guidance for protecting your own portfolio against major downturns.

Podcast Transcript:

Speaker: Consultant an advisor or conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money. Now, here’s your host, Reese Harper.

Reese Harper: Welcome to the Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I’m your host, Reese Harper. Here with my trusty old co-host, Sir Ryan Isaac.

Ryan Isaac: Hello, Reese. Thank you for the warm introduction, as always.

Reese Harper: Yeah, I’ve missed you for the last couple of weeks.

Ryan Isaac: It’s been a long one. It’s good to see you on this nice, summer morn.

Reese Harper: Yeah, we had to bring in some players over the last couple weeks to do some-

Ryan Isaac: To fill in the gaps.

Reese Harper: You know-

Ryan Isaac: They make better replacements.

Reese Harper: The audience has been requesting that we bring in some big names.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: So, we did.

Ryan Isaac: We dropped names.

Reese Harper: We brought their bidding in.

Ryan Isaac: Got a few hits.

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Have you had a good Brexit Week?

Reese Harper: You know, I think it’s going to be the word of the year. The “Brexit” word.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: You know how those dictionaries announce the word of the year?

Ryan Isaac: Uh huh.

Reese Harper: Like a few years ago it was “hashtag.”

Ryan Isaac: No, actually, I looked at this. “Selfie” and “planking” were actually winners in the past of words.

Reese Harper: Is planking when I lay on my stomach and do those exercises?

Ryan Isaac: No, not that. It’s like when you laid and played dead, like flat. People would do it. Remember that? People would lay on tables and fountains-

Reese Harper: Okay.

Ryan Isaac: And building edges-

Reese Harper: No I don’t recall-

Ryan Isaac: Arches-

Reese Harper: I think I recall that.

Ryan Isaac: Planking.

Reese Harper: A little bit.

Ryan Isaac: So old.

Reese Harper: Okay.

Ryan Isaac: Well, I’m pretty sure-

Reese Harper: You’re too young.

Ryan Isaac: I’m pretty sure this year’s winner will be “Brexit.”

Reese Harper: Yep.

Ryan Isaac: So, give it some time, and you’ll probably see it turn into a really popular Hollywood-

Reese Harper: Yeah, I think Jennifer Aniston’s pregnant [crosstalk 00:01:34] from when I saw the grocery store magazine list.

Ryan Isaac: Baby Brexit?

Reese Harper: Baby Brexit. It’s going to be big. Oh, Baby Brexit.

Ryan Isaac: It’s kind of fun to say.

Reese Harper: It’s a fun word to say, and it’s not so fun in terms of figuring out what it all mean’s. Obviously, we’ve had a lot of people asking how Great Britain’s decision to leave the EU is going to impact their portfolio’s and finances, and a lot of questions about it.

Ryan Isaac: LEt’s talk a little bit about the history of Great Britain and the European Union, which-

Reese Harper: The EU.

Ryan Isaac: Some people call the EU, people alright? THere’s about 28 countries that are part of the European Union. But, it actually goes back further to when Great Britain joined. Great Britain didn’t join the European Union until 1973, but from 1957 it started and it was called the European Economic Community.

Reese Harper: The EEC.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, you know, for those at the time used the acronym… Which is no one.

Reese Harper: Which is nobody. Ever.

Ryan Isaac: But the original goal was to prevent wars and strengthen economic bonds among the countries that had joined, and there was only 5 or 6 that initially joined. And Great Britain joined the EEC in 1973, and in 1993 it was renamed the European Union.

Reese Harper: The well-known EU.

Ryan Isaac: The EU.

Reese Harper: Okay [crosstalk 00:02:49].

Ryan Isaac: On Friday night, dinner and you’re talking or your fancy friends that are into finance-

Reese Harper: Drop the acronyms though.

Ryan Isaac: Talk about-

Reese Harper: Actually, mention the EEC.

Ryan Isaac: It’s really interesting that the EU used to be the EEC remember that? [crosstalk 00:03:03]

Reese Harper: Okay so for decades then there’s been this sort of evolution of European countries trying to form a more singular, less restricted marketplace. So, let’s talk about the press that was out this week. There was a lot of reporting about this all over the place.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, we were interested internally here why people in Great Britain voted to leave the European Union. What was the driver? Because most people in the US, all we heard was everyone was saying it was a bad idea. And, the developed equities, developed markets equities, the stock market in Europe was going up like every few days as it got closer to the decision date.

Reese Harper: Everything was fine.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, and everyone was like, “Hey, polls look good. THey’re staying, and everyone’s portfolios kept going up, and ultimately, despite what anyone said, President Obama told the UK when he was over there that they were going to go back in the queue was his famous statement all over. What trade negotiations the US was going with Great Britain wouldn’t be the same. There was a bunch of European officials that said that we’d go into recession. It would be the end of western political civilization. The bank of England even go involved and said, “Hey, we’re going to go into recession.” It was a big deal, and no authority said it’s going to be okay.

Reese Harper: The funny thing is Google published search queries after the vote.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: And it was off the charts for “What is the EU?”

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, exactly.

Reese Harper: So, everyone voted-

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: So it was-

Ryan Isaac: I got a text from my sister about that that morning.

Reese Harper: Okay.

Ryan Isaac: So, I know yeah.

Reese Harper: It was massive.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: Everyone voted, and then they went to go figure out what they just voted on.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:04:44] As, we do, okay? So, it seemed like the general consensus was that it should stay. Everyone was reporting, like you were saying, so what did… why did the people vote to leave, then?

Reese Harper: Well, I think We should clarify.

Ryan Isaac: I don’t think they know.

Reese Harper: Yeah. We should probably explain what staying means.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: Every country in the European Union has to pay money to get shared services from the European Union. There are some legal-

Ryan Isaac: Like a big co-op.

Reese Harper: Yeah, you get security, and you get economic subsidies. You get a lot of stuff by paying taxes into the system. So leaving meant you were going to be independent. You were not going to participate in the shared system, okay? One of the reasons people voted to leave, and the article didn’t say it exactly like this, but we can given the political climate we’re in right now, we’ll call it the Trump Principle.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: The Donald Trump Principle.

Ryan Isaac: Making Brexit Great Again.

Reese Harper: Yeah. So, you had all these voters who were really sick of listening to the establishment. You had the Prime Minister, you had the Bank of England, you had President Obama, you had a lot of their parliament. Everyone was just saying, “It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad. WE can’t leave, we can’t leave, we can’t leave.” And I think at some point a lot of people just got sick of it, and they wanted to revolt, and-

Ryan Isaac: WE don’t even care.

Reese Harper: If you look at the demographics it was older voters and rural voters chose to exit. But, downtown London and right in the suburbs, it was like 75% said to stay. IT was… Anyway, not passing saying it was good or bad, because at this point I think it is what it is. There’s good that will come of it eventually, but it could’ve been fine the way it was. It is what it is. But, a lot of the rural people and older people did vote to leave.

Ryan Isaac: Interesting. Okay, and it seems like we’ll talk about a few of the factors here, but it seems like immigration played a very big factor-

Reese Harper: Totally.

Ryan Isaac: It’s huge.

Reese Harper: Yeah, you’re right. A few people… if you think about it even like in the US there’s a lot of uncertainty and worry about immigration, especially with all the terrorism internationally that’s going on. You wonder if you’re safe, and a lot of people felt that as a member of the European Union, that Great Britain wouldn’t have control over the number of people that were coming into their country. Even though a lot of the experts disagreed and said, “no, we have controls. You have to have a passport. You can’t just be going over borders without showing proper documentation,” that message really sold well. There’s 2 groups. One was called the Leave Camp, and one was the Remain Camp.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, I was going to say, sometimes there’s really fancy acronyms for these groups, and sometimes it’s just Leave and Remain. So, we’ve got the Leave group and the Remain group.

Reese Harper: Right.

Ryan Isaac: Very intuitive.

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Thank you.

Reese Harper: And, it was funny because you start listening to the news, and Great Britain they started referring to them as Tents now. So, you have the Leave Tent and the Remain Tent. And the tents were getting broader and larger, and you have to kind foo really pay attention to really know what’s going on.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: Anyway, so the immigration thing was really interesting to me because… There’s a lot more going on in Great Britain in terms of fear about open borders than you would have assumed. You kind of hear about-

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, for sure.

Reese Harper: Europeans being really open armed and welcoming and… Trying to… With all the refugees that are moving across the-

Ryan Isaac: They’ve seen their fair share of tragedy too over the last few year.

Reese Harper: I think they’re just… the populous was just worried that by being part of the European Union they would have no control over their… The independence of their country. So…

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, and there’s a lot of energy around that issue like you’re saying. Some people are really supportive of refugees, and some people are really scared about it. Aside from immigration control and policies, what are some of the other reasons people voted to leave?

Reese Harper: The Leave Camp… We’ll call it that now.

Ryan Isaac: The Leave Tent?

Reese Harper: The Leave Tent… IT’s a camp with tents [crosstalk 00:08:34]. It’s a big tent.

Ryan Isaac: Let’s go camp.

Reese Harper: They had a really sticky message that they were promoting, and it basically said, on the side of all these buses and trains that were going all over the country, it said, we send 350 million pounds a week to the EU. Let’s fund our national healthcare system instead. Anytime you can appeal to a really populous message like that where-

Ryan Isaac: Save some money.

Reese Harper: You’re like, save money. Keep it for us.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah.

Reese Harper: I mean it’s going to resonate, and that really took off a lot more than most people thought. That was one of the number one reasons people voted… Why the left. On the exit polling that was… They wanted to keep the money in their own country. It’s kind of-

Ryan Isaac: So, is it true? Yeah.

Reese Harper: At the end of the day-

Ryan Isaac: It was a simple message for a complicated actual issue.

Reese Harper: Yes. Very simple message that isn’t entirely fact, but there’s some strength that will come from it long-term. There’s some short-term pain. And I think that’s the thing you have to deal with as an investor. You don’t know what decisions governments are going to make. You don’t know about natural disasters. You don’t know about wars, and so you can’t really make your investment decisions based on what you think the outcomes of a political fight are going to be. You just have to invest capital, and you have to have faith that companies are going to sort out how to make money in the new environment.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, well let’s get into that because the day after the vote, the Dow was down 611 points. Today as we’re recording this it’s down another 3.

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: Than when we started, so it’s been a really volatile period since then. Anyone with a diversified portfolio has exposure to Great Britain. It’s a developed market. It’s a big part of anyone’s international portfolio, so they felt it.

Reese Harper: Yeah, and as of 2016 if you look at the US market, just the US market makes up about 50% of the world-wide equity market, so all the stocks in the US are about 50% of-

Ryan Isaac: The whole world.

Reese Harper: Everything in the world. And then, if you look at what we call developed markets, that’s the bigger countries in Europe and Japan it includes Great Britain and-

Ryan Isaac: Canada.

Reese Harper: And Canada. We don’t want to leave Canada out.

Ryan Isaac: No, we don’t want to leave Canada out.

Reese Harper: There’s some Canadians that would be very upset if we do.

Ryan Isaac: That great country.

Reese Harper: Yeah, and so right now, if you look at… How much of a percentage UK is of developed markets, it’s pretty meaningful. So you have about 50% in the US, 40% in developed markets, and 10% in emerging countries. Great Britain is part of the developed markets index, or indices. You’ll see them range anywhere from 13 to 17% of any mutual fund or index or ETF that is invested in international developed markets.

Ryan Isaac: Right, so most of your mutual funds have exposure to developed markets, and developed, let’s say outside the United States.

Reese Harper: In countries that are larger, yes.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, not the small, the emerging markets. They probably experienced the sharpest decline on Friday, so if you have any stocks or mutual funds that are exclusively invested in British stocks, they would have gone down the most.

Reese Harper: Yeah, and just to put some figures to what happened Friday, the US went down about 3.5% on Friday, and developed markets, as a whole, were down almost 8%, but if you look exclusively at the United Kingdom, it was down almost 12%. And that trend of the US not being down quite as far as the developed markets and not as far as Great Britain itself, you saw that today too. We’re recording this on Monday, and we’ll have to see what happens on Tuesday and Wednesday when this gets released. But, the 12% decline in Great Britain had a huge impact because the UK makes up one seventh, maybe one sixth, depending on the index.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, it’s meaningful.

Reese Harper: Of all the developed market stocks that are there. If you take some context, if you all of the stocks let’s say in France and Canada and Germany, you get the same value as what’s in Great Britain. So you got Germany, France and Canada all combined equal the equities in Great Britain.

Ryan Isaac: So it’s really impactful, and then the remaining ones are the emerging markets which include Brazil, Chile…

Reese Harper: Chile, dude.

Ryan Isaac: I knew, as soon as that left my mouth.

Reese Harper: Brazil.

Ryan Isaac: Brazil? China, Colombia, and a bunch of other smaller countries. Those were down about 5% for the day on Friday, so when stuff like this happens, a lot of people get frustrated with their investments, and they just get sick of watching portfolios go down.

Reese Harper: Totally.

Ryan Isaac: It feels like there’s something you got to do about it.

Reese Harper: Mm-hmm (affirmative) And owning stocks is not an easy ride. It’s not unusual for stocks to experience no gain for years. Especially when we have periods of economic turmoil like right now. So, for this reason you don’t want to have all of your portfolio invested in stocks. Especially as you age. Most of our clients-

Ryan Isaac: Not an investment recommendation, disclaimer.

Reese Harper: No. Yeah. A lot of our clients will have large amounts of money and bonds in their portfolios. I know on Friday, if you look at the main bond index, which is the Barclay’s Capital Aggregate, it was up over half a percent on Friday, which is a pretty significant move for bonds to make in just one day. So, you can kind of see how bonds do move opposite of stocks, even when there are periods of crisis. Do you remember like in 2009 and 2008 everyone everything went down the same time.

Ryan Isaac: Same time, yeah, same.

Reese Harper: That can happen in really rare circumstances, like when you have stock market decline in a day, you’ll see the bond market go up, just like you did on Friday.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, and one takeaway. I think the natural reaction is to say, well why do I own this stuff? Why is it in my portfolio? But, one takeaway, it’s interested to me is that, all the stocks in the world, they don’t move nit he same direction, or at least they don’t move at the same amount-

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: At the same time every day. I’m sure everyone’s waiting for… So what? What do I do about this? So, how should Brexit, #Brexit-

Reese Harper: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:14:29] Baby Brexit.

Ryan Isaac: Baby Brexit… How should Brexit affect their investment strategy. And, I would include in here, if you’re listening to this 4 years from now, insert the crisis, you know?

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: The natural disaster, the presidential election, the corporate scandal. Insert the crisis, and how should that crisis…

Reese Harper: Chinese economy.

Ryan Isaac: Chinese economy.

Reese Harper: Japanese tsunami.

Ryan Isaac: Yes.

Reese Harper: I can go through for the last 6 months because they’re imprinted on my mind because we have a lot of conversation with people about it.

Ryan Isaac: So, how does this affect your investment strategy then?

Reese Harper: Well, I think it’s a good time to highlight a few principles. So, anytime we get a major event that effects markets like this really quickly, we see calls coming in, and definitely things start picking up. And it’s true. People react to these moments, but in fairness to our clients, and I was really impressed to see how everybody reacted on Friday. We always have conversations, but I think over time it’s interesting to see how mature people are becoming with their investment portfolios, how they react to news, and they’re asking the right questions. They’re not being influenced too much by media and headlines. But, there’s definitely a few perspectives that are worth sharing that have come out of this. I liked one from a financial writer. His name is Wess Wellington.

Ryan Isaac: I like this guy.

Reese Harper: I thought he shared some good insight. Why don’t you read the quote.

Ryan Isaac: Sure. Wess said, “Given the challenge, the difficulty is in first, predicting the events, but even the greater challenge is predicting how other investors will react to these events.”

Reese Harper: Yeah, I like that quote. So, you got the first problem is predicting the event itself, right? Did we know that Brexit was going to happen? No.

Ryan Isaac: Well all the experts said no.

Reese Harper: Until the day of the… You didn’t even know until the vote came out. Now, in… First you can’t predict economic events. Okay?

Ryan Isaac: So stop it.

Reese Harper: Yeah, just don’t do that. But, you and I both saw 10 articles after that saying, “See how I predicted this?” “I predicted Brexit.” “Look at me. I knew, I knew Brexit was going to happen.” I had several clients send me content of people predicting Brexit the day that Brexit happened, and I just feel like that ultimately is people capitalizing on hindsight, you know, and that’s all it is. You can’t predict economic events, and you don’t know how other people are going to react to those events.

Ryan Isaac: That’s the harder part. That’s all the market is is it’s people’s reactions and expectations about what news comes out.

Reese Harper: Yeah, and a lot of the-

Ryan Isaac: What if everyone thought it was good.

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: And markets went up because of it?

Reese Harper: Well, and, a lot of… Is the reason that the markets is currently experiencing this downward pressure for rational reasons, or is it because of lack of liquidity, is it because of fear out of trade policies. This hasn’t even happened yet.

Ryan Isaac: No, no, this could take… Yeah. This could actually take years.

Reese Harper: Yeah, and we don’t know whether the companies that are currently being discounted at 7, 8, 9% are being discounted for a rational reason or just because of short term market fear, expectations, I mean… so you have to be careful as you jump to conclusions about why markets move a certain way. That quote that you just read just highlighted 2 reasons. We don’t know events that are going to occur in advance. You can’t predict the future of economic events. But you don’t know how other people are going to react to those events either. Like you said, it could have been precisely the opposite move given a diff marketing message or a different PR strategy, or, you know? I don’t think people know very much about Brexit, period. And so that’s just interesting to see how people react.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, and so you’re saying just don’t kid yourself into thinking this was obvious.

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: It’s only obvious now, and it wasn’t even obvious an hour before it happened.

Reese Harper: No. Yeah, and one other thing I liked from this quote was how you didn’t read this part, but he talked about maintaining broad diversification across companies, industries, and countries, and currencies, the best way to protect yourself. And, the idea that people need to jump in and out of different currencies, different markets, different companies, different countries, different industries, it creates a lot of uncertainty. I just don’t think that’s the right way to behave in market conditions like this.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah. We always talk about the best way to protect ourselves against uncertainty is to accumulate a large net worth. And, even with a broadly diversified portfolio though you shouldn’t invest everything you own into equity markets when you’re close to retirement.

Reese Harper: Yeah, accumulate a large net worth and then this volatility will have less impact on you, but, like you said, when you start getting towards retirement, we see a lot of people with too little amount of money that they’ve saved, and it’s too heavily tilted towards risky assets like stocks. So, we talk about this a lot, but we want to see people have 30 times their annual spending in net worth, at least, before they retire. At least 25, but getting to 30 or greater gives them a chance to have a little bit of a hedge, and by doing this you protect yourself from the swings that occur in the market because you can ride them out. You can afford to last through a market cycle. It’s the people with a tentative 15X, we call it 10 to 15 TT, which is 10 times their spending their spending or 15 times your annual spending. They can’t really afford to have much equity exposure, and they’re the people that sometimes try to knock the ball out of the park to make up for the face that they didn’t save enough or accumulate enough earlier in life.

Ryan Isaac: Exactly. It’s like you said. It’s all about the TT.

Reese Harper: Yeah, son.

Ryan Isaac: I think that’s in a Taylor Swift song, isn’t it?

Reese Harper: I don’t know.

Ryan Isaac: All about the TT.

Reese Harper: You can recommend that.

Ryan Isaac: I will do that.

Reese Harper: Send your lyrics in.

Ryan Isaac: Okay, so anything else that you liked from last week?

Reese Harper: I liked one statement released by a company called Dimensional, and I think it sums up what happened on Friday really well. It said, “We urge caution in allowing market movements to impact long-term massive allocation.” Long-term investors recognize that risks an uncertainties are ever-present in markets, and a drop in prices is general due to lower expectations of cash flows, higher discount rates, or both. I know that probably is confusing to people, but when markets and equities decline or increase, that is happening because investors have a different expectation now of cash flows that might be coming from those companies. That might be a difference in trade expectations, that people have had about Great Britain, even. Those trade expectations might not even be implemented. We don’t know exactly how all that’s going to shake out. So, there’s not a rational reason yet today that the market should be discounting the equities at such an extreme level, but we’ll find out why that is happening as you let time pass. I don’t know. I really like to… I just like to encourage people to continue to stay diversified. Precisely at the time where it feels like you should avoid a country lik Great Britain, or walk away from it is probably the time when it makes the most sense to continue to be patient with that asset class because it’s at a buying opportunity that much less expensive than it was a month ago so… anyway…

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, and that’s a good point about actually being there to take advantage of recovery periods. If you’re saying that just the UK itself was down 12%, that’s not what it does forever, so no one knows when that’s going to recover. And, equity markets, just as they move down really quickly over the last 2 days, they do the same thing on the way back up, so by trying to dart in and out and avoid certain asset classes or countries based on whatever news comes out, you risk not being around for those few days when those big gains offset all the losses and help your portfolio, not just recover, but ultimately over time, they grow.

Reese Harper: Yeah.

Ryan Isaac: That’s where you get your growth from.

Reese Harper: Yeah, and that’s why we want clients to stay broadly diversified because over time, as you continue to save money, regardless of the movement in the market, you’ll be able to take your emotions out of your decisions, and we always say that clients need to pass through several of these market cycles before they can mature as an investor and understand how markets work. We’re not saying it’s easy, but the evidence supports the strategy. And, it’s the most viable option for investors, so-

Ryan Isaac: Okay. Interesting discussion. Thanks, Reese.

Reese Harper: Yeah, thank you, man. A little bit deep for a-

Ryan Isaac: It was heavy.

Reese Harper: For a Monday.

Ryan Isaac: It’s fine. I think the big question everybody is wondering right now is if… Will we have a Brexit emoji by the end of all this?

Reese Harper: Yeah. What will that look like, huh? Maybe a… I think it’s a caricature of that Boris Johnson guy with the crazy, blonde hair.

Ryan Isaac: Yeah, he’s in the Leave Tent. He kinda looks like Trump a little bit.

Reese Harper: That could be good-

Ryan Isaac: That could be good man. Alright, well thanks to all of our listeners for joining us. Remember to give us some feedback while this episode is fresh in your mind. Just go to the “listen” tab of dentistadvisors.com. Use the comment section for this episode. Love to hear from you, and while you’re on the website, you can schedule a free consultation, and don’t forget to like our Dentist Advisors Facebook page.

Reese Harper: Carry on.

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