Mail Bag with Brian Regan; pros and cons of concentration

0:03 The following is paid programming. Welcome to Something More with Chris Boyd. Chris Boyd is a Certified Financial Planner Practitioner and Senior Vice President and Financial Advisor at Wealth Enhancement Group, one of the nation's largest registered investment advisors. We call it Something More because we'd like to talk not only about those important dollar and cents issues, but also the quality of life issues that make the money matters matter. Here he is, your fulfillment facilitator, your partner in prosperity, advising clients on Cape Cod and across the country. Here's your host, Jay Christopher Boyd. Welcome to another edition of Something More with Chris Boyd.

0:43 I'm Jeff Perry. I'm sitting in for Chris for this episode. Chris is at a convention, a financial services, financial planning convention this week. And so I'm sitting in and joining me is Brian Regan. Brian is a member of Team AMR. He is a senior portfolio manager with Wealth Enhancement Group and a regular guest on our show. Thanks for joining us, Brian. Hey, guys. How are you doing? great also joining us is russ ball the newest addition to team amr russ thanks for working the control panel and joining us for this episode of course happy to be here for the people who click the podcast link they'll see the title of this episode is mailbag with brian regan and what that means is brian's going to handle a couple of questions that have come from clients and give us a uh his opinion and we'll have a dialogue on the issue Brian, this first one came from a recent client review.

1:40 What that means for the listeners who don't know is at least annually, we sit down with a prolonged meeting, a couple hour meeting with our clients to go over their financial plan that they have in place and discuss if they have any changes to their life or anything that they're concerned about. We follow up with any things that we see. And this particular client, is a big fan of yours. He watches all of the webinars on the markets and the economy. He just, you know, he loves that. Not everybody loves to dig in that stuff. I know you do, but he just loves learning more about it. And so this issue that I'm going to describe has come up repetitively in his annual reviews and conversations with him.

2:21 And he's kind of been, I won't say stuck that's, but it's the best word I can come up with. He keeps hesitating on doing something that we are suggesting that he do. And this year it came up again and he seemed more, um, interested in doing something with this part of his portfolio. and he asked us, he said, would you just, would you pass this question by Brian? And I said, you know what, how about if we pass this question by Brian on the podcast and let him answer it? And he just, he loved the idea. So, uh, we know he'll be listening to the answer and, uh, we'll see how it goes. So let me, let me, I know, you know, the question because I formatted it to you, but, um, let me, for our listeners, uh, Read what I sent you.

3:10 So this is a client who's about seven years old. He's got about one hundred thousand dollars in Verizon stock. He was an employee of Verizon and like many employees of corporations, he acquired stock over the years. And he very much likes every quarter getting a dividend of about fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred dollars. It's the dividend on the stock right now. Annualized is about six point five percent. client is looking for income but he's concerned about the risk of this individual stock verizon a potential decline in the value of verizon and thus maybe they don't have the ability to continue to pay uh their dividend as a side note which I didn't write in the email brian we When during this discussion that we have with this client, the issues of the former issues with AT&T comes up because he was in a holder of AT&T and similar concerns and AT&T ultimately in the past had cut their dividend and shocked some people who had bought the stock.

4:15 So that comes up in the context. Overall, the client has a moderate risk profile. He's not afraid of risk, but as he's getting older, he's becoming more conservative thinking. the question is what would you suggest he do I think knowing that he likes the income stream what would you suggest he do with this hundred thousand dollars of verizon stock all right so I'm gonna get in the verizon I I'm not gonna leave rick hanging um so before I do that I do want to get into uh some of the reasons on why I don't recommend buying a stock just for the dividend yield.

4:56 As a general rule of thumb, I don't think that's a good idea. Now, oftentimes the dividend yield is high because a dividend cut is imminent. You mentioned AT&T, that did happen. It tanked the stock at the time. I believe they have the dividend if I'm remembering correctly. so sometimes the high dividend yield uh could mean that it's just you know it's just a mirage this is a temporary thing it's it's gonna be you know cut in half in the case of at t it's some some future point in time probably very soon um that's oftentimes what the what the market is saying when it cuts the price down so much uh that the dividend yield looks high now that's not always the case and we'll get into you know verizon specific um after a few more points Now, there's a few reasons why I don't like buying stocks just for the dividend.

5:48 Dividend-oriented funds and stocks chronically underperform stocks that do not prioritize dividends. Now, there's four things that you can do if you're a company with your cash flow. You can reinvest in the business. That means more growth. So if you're prioritizing the dividend, you're probably not going to grow that much. You can pay down debt. That makes your business more secure. You're far more likely to go bankrupt if you have a lot of debt. You can buy back stock. This is Really the same thing as a dividend, except it's much more tax efficient. You're going to get a capital gain. You can decide when to pay that tax on your own rather than getting it quarterly as the client is getting. And the last thing you can do is pay a dividend.

6:28 Prioritizing a dividend at the expense of these matters can lead to worse overall performance, and that seems to be the case. If you look at any dividend-oriented fund just against the S&P I think it's important to keep those things in mind. So Brian, when you see a company, any company that's maintaining a high dividend, what, what are you thinking? Cause they know these choices as well. Are you thinking that they, what are you thinking? I don't want to put words in your mouth. Why would a company pay a dividend so large when they have these other options, which fundamentally might be better for the health of the corporation?

7:09 Well, it might be the right thing to pay a dividend, right? It might be a very mature company that isn't going to grow very much. They don't have a lot of options to reinvest in their business. They might have a very reasonable balance sheet where it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pay down more debt. They might be buying back stock too. Maybe they're doing half and half. Maybe they're paying a dividend for the certain amount and maybe they're buying back stock. This is another problem generally with the dividend yield. Sometimes I'll see a company is buying back twice as much stock as they're paying a dividend. It looks like the dividend's very low when people just ignore it, thinking that the dividend's not high enough. One percent's not nearly enough for me, when in reality, the return to shareholders is more like three, three and a half percent when you put in the buyback yield.

7:58 Getting back to some of the things on how to create cash flow, which is oftentimes a problem when people are thinking about dividends. They like the cash flow, right? They want to create a new paycheck and retirement. Well, it would have been far better to hold Google, for example, which only recently started paying a dividend over the last ten years and sell the shares as needed than to hold Verizon. You know, over the last ten years, Google's up five hundred fifty two percent and Verizon's only up thirty seven and a half percent. And that's total return that includes dividend. So you're much better off holding the stock and selling some shares as needed and creating a paycheck that way rather than rather than taking the dividend and my final point on this before we get into verizon specifically is if you really want income and stability you're probably better off moving up in the capital structure and buying fixed income especially where rates are today right so uh this is going to come into play when we start thinking about the value of verizon but if you just buy the I shares high yield index for example It's outperformed Verizon over the last ten years while being higher in the capital structure.

9:03 Could you define for our listeners who may not be familiar with the term that you're saying, capital structure, higher in the capital structure? Sure. So the capital structure means the best way to think about it is the priority of payments, right? So you are contractually obligated to pay your interest expense on your debt. That is something that has to happen. If you can't do that, you go bankrupt and the equity goes to zero. So that is, it's much more likely to be paid. And if it isn't, then the company's bankrupt and the equity of the company isn't worth anything anyways. So it's a much safer asset for that reason. It should be less volatile for that reason. And we see that fixed income is very much less volatile than equity.

9:47 And dividends, for example, they are returns to shareholders, equity returns. They are not contractually obligated to pay that. So they can just cut it, right? You can't cut the payment to fixed income. You can cut the payments to equity holders. right it's perfectly fine perfectly legally you will not go bankrupt um so there's much more stability in buying fixed income and if the yields are similar and there's no growth uh all things equal I I mean I I would much rather hold the fixed income instrument right and to put this to the extreme example if a company does go bankrupt dividends are long gone and shareholders they're the shares that they own they're last on the list of to be fed right at the bankruptcy table Right.

10:29 And there's a good chance you're going to get something back in your fixed income, especially if it's a secured asset. Senior secured assets generally return about eighty percent of the capital in bankruptcy. So they're much they're much more stable, much more reasonable assets to hold if you're looking for quote unquote income. OK, let's dig into Verizon itself now. What we're going to talk about isn't a recommendation to buy a stock. It's not a recommendation to sell a stock. We're giving Brian's thoughts on the question that this particular client make and past performance is certainly not any predictor of future results. Right. So that's important. And despite everything I just said, rarely, but sometimes, a high dividend yield can represent an overlooked stock.

11:16 I think it's important to say it's rare, but sometimes it happens. It's worth looking, especially if it's a mature, well-known company with few competitors. Oftentimes, it's just overlooked. Could just be a money machine, right? Not popular in the current stock market popularity contest. It's rare, but it happens. When it does happen, I love to take advantage of it. That being said, we do own Verizon for clients that we manage money for on a discretionary basis for individual stocks. So let's get in the why. The dividend of six point four six percent is five times higher than the overall market.

11:59 So it's not even close. This is much, much, much higher than the S&P five hundred, for example. So that is an indication that if it can pay the dividend, it is. probably very cheap and has the opportunity for capital gains going forward because it's very cheap the dividend is very well covered by the cash flow so the free cash flow runs about three and three to five billion dollars a quarter while the dividend is two point eight billion so you can see that three to five billion is higher than the two point eight billion uh so you know there's it can reasonably you know pay the div continue to pay the dividend If interest rates come down, particularly long rates or spreads continue to tighten.

12:44 And by spreads, I mean the difference between a high yield instrument and a treasury instrument. If that difference continues to come in, I would expect decent price movement in this company to accompany the dividend, which is great. Right. So I'll give you an example. We initiated the position much lower than the stock currently is now. which is great. And the expectation was that as interest rates came down, I would get price appreciation. Now, you might get the sense that I'm not planning on being in this stock forever. And that makes sense. I have a thesis that it's underappreciated, partly because it's viewed as somewhat of a fixed income type instrument and that as rates come down, the price will appreciate as the price appreciates.

13:35 I likely won't want to be in this stock further as we realize that price appreciations. Now, all that's good, right? But there's real concerns about the stock. don't think it's an obvious hold um I I would say that I am looking at this as a as a source of funds if I find a better opportunity right now I mentioned that we bought it lower we've had some appreciation we've owned it for a little over a year and a half um I've been I've been happy with it so far uh it's not like I have an itchy trigger finger on it but if I find something that is consistent and going to grow for a long period of time this might be a way that I fund that new purchase.

14:19 So I don't think it's an obvious hold. The growth is flat to negative, which is unsurprising, right? It pays a high dividend, not reinvesting in the business as much. So it's not growing as much. So any price appreciation would have to come from that change in rates, or they would have to cut costs pretty dramatically to grow the bottom line. Cutting costs would presumably make them less competitive in the future. This is an important point, especially since... sprint and t-mobile merged to be to be a very competitive uh third provider of of cell service uh in this country right there's really the big three there's t-mobile there's at&t and verizon before the merger that was really at&t and verizon now there's a there's a much more bigger competitive threat There's a lot of evidence throughout the history of the stock market that a duopoly is great and you add a third competitor and things start to get a lot hairier for these stocks.

15:21 Now, there's a lot of debt on the business, right? I said that we could pay down debt and make the company more secure. This company has a lot of debt on the business. This company has more debt on the business than AT&T does to your prior point, right? With a lot of it coming due in the next What does that mean? Well, it doesn't mean that they're not going to be able to pay it. They have about twenty billion coming in the next twelve months. I mentioned that they only have three to five billion in cash flow per year. So they're going to have to refinance the debt similar to how you would refinance a house. They're not going to pay down the principal completely with their cash flow. What they're going to do is finance that money with higher yielding debt than they currently have just because rates have gone higher.

16:09 They are an investment grade company. I don't expect this to be a problem. But you can see that over the last few years, as rates have gone higher, this has eaten into their net income as interest rates have moved higher. So that's another reason to be concerned about the future of this company. If we're already growing at flat to negative, this can only be a bad thing. And aren't they making a big acquisition soon? They are. They're buying Frontier Communications. This is going to be my next point for twenty billion dollars in alt cash. So the transaction will need even more financing. Most acquisitions turn out to be a bad idea. I do not know enough about frontier communications and Verizon's business to make a judgment on whether or not it's going to be a bad idea.

16:54 But I do know that about seventy five percent of acquisitions end up being poor acquisitions. So. You know, I wouldn't bet on a two fifty hitter getting a hit when he comes up to the plate. And, you know, that seems to be the odds that I'm handed here. You know, and moreover, I know for I know for a fact that my my interest costs are going to are going to go up. So the bottom line is, you know, I've held the stock for a year and a half. For me, that's not a long time. uh and done fine with it uh but it would likely be a source of funds because it does have some hair on it uh the dividend seems safe for now but there's a lot of debt in the business um and we're hoping to benefit more from lower interest rates which seem less likely now than they seemed uh you know uh probably a year ago to me so um we've done well in it uh I'm happy about that uh There is some hair on the stock.

17:50 If interest rates continue to move lower, that would be very good for the stock, but I think that's less likely to happen than it has in the last year. We see spreads at historic tights. We see you know, inflation expected to move higher now in twenty twenty five, at least by a little bit. And those things are not good for the downward trajectory of interest rates. So the reasons why we like the stock in the first place are largely going away. And there's been some price appreciation, price appreciation. So the stock's fine. I don't love it. I wouldn't own it just for the dividend. Yeah. And just kind of a side comment here about financial planning principles generally.

18:33 we attempt to discourage individuals, clients who have a concentrated holding in a single holding and for, you know, it depends on the size of their assets, depends on their net worth and how it fits into their whole financial plan. But generally we don't like to have our clients have a single holding represent more than five percent, for example, of their entire portfolio. And so, you know, that's an individual situation. We're not going to get into the details of this client, but if it's a, If you acquire a lot of stock, like in this case, this individual did while they're working. And so it's normal that clients and prospects come to us and they're retiring and they have a less company stock. And one of the common things that we discuss with them is, is it prudent to have all of the stock, all this value, all these assets in one holding, even if you love it, even if you don't have any concerns about it, maybe you worked in the industry forever.

19:27 You're confident in the trajectory of this company. It's not prudent for the principles of diversification to have so much of your assets invested in one company. The risk is just too great. Russ, you probably see that with some people that you've been talking to where they have a concentrated holding and the advice that we typically give them. Definitely. I think that's been a conversation I've been having a lot recently. Also, we talked about it on our recent podcast episode, some of the risks of having too much in one specific stock. But it's also one stock, but also a specific sector. So it could be a lot of different companies, but they're all concentrated in one specific group, maybe a telecom, maybe technology.

20:13 Obviously, technology has done really well. uh, recently, but maybe, maybe Brian, you have any thoughts on, um, sector diversification and maybe certain limits that you'd want to cap yourself at if you're looking at one specific industry. Well, I, I don't want to talk about specific capsule limits because I, I don't like to talk about hard rules, but I will say that I, I see this mistake a lot. Um, I see people hold Verizon and TNT and T-Mobile, and they think they're diversified. You know, when you add them up, it's a very significant amount of a portfolio. I see people on Verizon and MasterCard a lot. It's essentially the same business. You know, you can see, especially these days, you can see a lot of Nvidia, a lot of AMD, and then they'll have a semiconductor ETF.

20:59 And, you know, what I like to call it is the illusion of diversification. But sometimes you'll see people with three or four dividend ETFs. And when you look into the top holdings, they're all the same company. So, you know, I call it the illusion of diversification. It's not you're not really diversified. It just looks like you are because you have four tickers. But you're very concentrated in a sector or a type of investment. And when that goes out of favor for one reason or another, you know, you're going to feel it more than you probably expect. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Brian, for your comments on that one. Let's go dig into the mailbag and ask the next question.

21:39 So this is a couple who are in their forties and they're saving for retirement. Like most people, they're using their four or one case, which is real common. Their risk tolerance is high. They're very tolerant of taking risks. They know they get a long runway here and they don't expect to use these funds until they retire. They have four or one K funds in a model portfolio. one of their choices and it has twenty five percent exposure to international stock funds so they were digging in they were doing their research which I love to love to hear that people are looking at what's inside of these funds and they believe that they found that the return on international stock funds has lagged the US stock funds for a long time and they're asking They understand diversification, what we were just talking about, in this case being diversified to international investing as well.

22:35 But they're asking, should they continue to keep a portion of their funds in their retirement account exposed to international equities after a period of long underperformance? And if so, why? And if not, why not? It's a great question and one that I ask myself all the time, honestly. I wrote down some thoughts for the pro all US argument and the pro international diversification argument. And then I'll tell you how I personally treat it and how we treat it from the vast majority of our clients. So the pro all US, this particular couple is correct. UF stocks have done much better than international stocks over a significant period of time.

23:19 For this analysis, I looked back I believe it was a ten-year period, and I think there was a thirteen percent return on the S&P five hundred and the MSCI, All Country World Index, ex-US was up maybe just over four percent. So there was a big, big difference between international and US over the last decade. And, you know, ten years to me is not a short period of time. I'm constantly preaching this thing for the long term. And most people incorrectly, when I say that, think, you know, three months to two years is a long time, but no, I'm thinking much more than that. And this couple seems to be on the right page, right? They're thinking over twenty years, they're looking back over ten years.

24:02 You know, it's really hard when you look at this past data and say, It makes sense to invest internationally when you look at the performance data. In addition, there's a really good argument that large cap domestic stocks generate enough revenue from international countries where it's unnecessary to further diversify into those markets. This was a popular stance from Vanguard's John Bogle before he died. You know, the other thing is U.S. has a relatively attractive demographics, at least now, compared to the rest of the world because of the increase in immigration that we've had. We have generally younger demographics than a lot of the developed world, and especially that of something like China.

24:48 So, you know, that's the argument for all U.S. And I think it's a strong one. So I'm going to make the argument for international diversification. Brian, I want you to dig into that a little bit more about Vanguard's posture. And, you know, you've shared it with before. But for people who haven't heard you before, why are you saying that a positive for all U.S. already kind of gives you some exposure to foreign markets? Well, you're going to get exposure. Let's say some company domiciled in New York City is a multinational corporation, right? That means they sell in Europe, they sell in China, they sell in Japan.

25:33 They're going to have currency exposure in all those countries because they transact in euros or yen or won. And they're going to have exposure to the consumer in all those countries as well. And I looked at this recently, and don't mark my words because I'm doing this off the top of my head, but I think about thirty percent of the revenue of the S&P five hundred is generated internationally. So you're going to have a lot of the benefit of the international consumer just by holding the largest five hundred stocks in the United States. Very good. Thank you for adding that commentary on that. So go to the other argument of why we should have direct international exposure in our portfolios.

26:20 Yeah, so ten years is a long time. I mentioned that earlier with the U.S., But most of us are probably going to be investing for longer than ten years. I hope to be investing for the next sixty years of my life, for example. That means I'll have a very, very nice long life, one that I could be proud of. But in reality, I'll probably be investing for longer than those sixty years. Because I hope to get to a point where I'm investing for my heirs to a certain degree. So if you're older and you're thinking, I don't have ten years, the likelihood that you're investing for longer than ten years is probably very, very, very high. Oftentimes we see that people are outliving their money.

27:02 So you might want to think in increments that are much longer than ten years. And I will say that, you know, I'll admit that ten years is a long time. If an investment's not panning out over ten years, you might want to rethink your thesis. Now, why is that important? There are long stretches where international stocks have performed, including the late eighties and the early two thousands. Now that the late eighties and the early two thousands, that's well within my lifetime. You know, and that's long within the time that my parents, for example, have been investing. So you might want exposure to take advantage of those opportunities. You know, if a client's investing for many decades, this is evidence that it might be helpful to have an international allocation.

27:49 Many people believe that part of the reason for the international underperformance has been the extent of dollar strength. And if the dollar to weaken, an international would benefit. This is a reasonable argument. And year after year, I hear people say that the dollar is too strong relative to global interest rates. And that's fine. Now, the problem is the dollar keeps getting stronger and stronger relative to international companies. So we can't see if this thesis is true. But what this is important for is saying that all the data that I've talked about is historical data. This says nothing about what's going to happen in the future, right? We talked about the returns over the last ten years.

28:31 We talked about returns outperforming in the late eighties and the early two thousands. That was all a long time ago, and we need to be forward looking as investors. This argument is a good argument about being forward looking now. There's also a very good argument that international stocks are much, much cheaper than domestic stocks. The price to earnings ratio is about eight turns cheaper. And the dividend yield is about twice that of domestic stocks. So, you know, on those two very common use metrics for valuation, international stocks are much, much cheaper. I would argue that there's some good reasons for this. Mostly that they're not growing as quick. And they're not growing as quick because they don't have...

29:16 technology industry that is as robust as ours here in the United States. Now, how do we put all this together? And, um, you know, what do I do personally? And what do we do for our clients? Well, personally, I do have some international stock positions. So the way my personal portfolio is, which I become more and more convinced that it's helpful for people to tell them what am I'm doing with my money? I invest very much alongside with our clients, but about half my investment portfolio is an index funds and about half of it is an individual stock positions. so on the index funds you can say for all intents and purposes that I'm in the s p and on on my individual stock positions I have international stocks in there now I why do I think that's good well I don't do it specifically because I want international diversification, even though I think that's an added benefit.

30:17 I do it because I think they're some of the best in class companies. And I want to buy the best in class companies when it comes to my individual stock portfolio, regardless of where they are domiciled in the world. Um, not necessarily, regardless, there are certain reasons why I wouldn't want to hold Chinese stocks, for example, even if they tend to be very, very good companies. But generally speaking, I want to hold, uh, the best companies in, in, in reasonable and reasonable countries. Um, and that ends up being about of my, my individual stock, uh, portfolio. Uh, Now, for our ETF mutual fund portfolios for individual clients, we utilize an active mutual fund that's pretty concentrated.

31:00 So what do I mean by that? Well, some of the best companies in the world that I mentioned that I might have in my individual stock portfolio are going to be some of the top holdings in this active mutual fund. And that's one of the reasons why we choose to use that. We've been underweight international against the MSC Acqui Index, which is The reason of which is I'm really stripping out China. I don't really like being in China exposed stocks. As a replacement, I've chosen to be in emerging market bonds. And that's been really great for us because in recent years, it's giving us about the same amount of return as those emerging market stocks, but with much, much, much less risk.

31:44 And that's benefited for us. So that's how I do it personally. And that's how we're doing it for the vast majority of our clients. Russ, did you have any questions for Brian on the subject of investing internationally? Yeah, I guess when you're looking at opportunities to invest internationally, are you looking at, you know, you mentioned specific companies that you just think are really good companies. That makes a lot of sense. Are you ever looking at specific regions as potential areas where opportunity can evolve based on the growth story or, for example, with some of the nearshoring developments that have gone over the last several years? I know a lot of analysts look at emerging markets as potentially higher opportunities.

32:24 higher growth opportunities than developed international markets. What are your thoughts on that? I think the story is different when you think about funds and it's different versus individual stocks. when I buy international stocks the individual stocks of the individual companies I don't think of it any differently than I think of my uh allocation to domestic stocks I'm looking for consistent companies with growth so uh you know what is what does that mean well think about some companies in domestic markets that might have near monopolies uh think about companies that are predictably growing margins that trade at fair prices.

33:06 That's what I'm doing when it comes to the individual market. Now, that has very little to do with short-term trends. It's more about what I expected to do in the long term. Now, when it comes to funds, we do have a strategy called the Sixty Forty Core Explore. Now, the Core Explore is The core part of that portfolio is the strategies that we would utilize because we like them for the long term. the explore part of that portfolio would try to take advantage of some short term opportunity. So in that explore part of that portfolio, which is a relatively small part, but it ends up to be about fourteen percent of the portfolio, we're trying to take advantage of some of the things that you mentioned.

33:54 And sometimes that might end up having an allocation to an international ETF or mutual fund. For example, we've been in a japan focused etf in the last couple years in that we've been in an india one and more recent past so you know those types of trends could could end up in that in that portfolio great Thank you, Brian, for taking on a couple of our client listener questions and digging into them. I enjoy your commentary always, and I know our listeners do as well. And thank you for listening to our podcast today. If you'd like to give us your opinion on our podcast, in the show notes of this episode is a link to a survey.

34:39 And we'd like to know what you think about the topics that we talk about, maybe what you'd like to hear. If you'd just take a minute and complete that survey, we would really appreciate it. Until next time, keep striving for something more. thank you for listening to something more with chris boyd call us for help whether it's for financial planning or portfolio management insurance concerns or those quality of life issues that make the money matters matter whatever's on your mind visit us at somethingmorewithchrisboyd.com or call us toll free at eight six six seven seven one eight nine zero one or send us your questions to amr dash info at wealthenhancement.com You're listening to Something More with Chris Boyd Financial Talk Show.

35:25 Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services and Jay Christopher Boyd provide investment advice on an individual basis to clients only. Proper advice depends on a complete analysis of all facts and circumstances. The information given on this program is general financial comments and cannot be relied upon as pertaining to your specific situation. Wealth Enhancement Group cannot guarantee that using the information from this show will generate profits or ensure freedom from loss. Listeners should consult their own financial advisors or conduct their own due diligence before making any financial decisions.