SKEPTIC’S GUIDE TO INVESTING

Money Masters: Integrity in Wealth Management

• Steve Davenport, Clement Miller

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Joe Sroka of NovaPoint Capital shares his journey from West Point graduate and military officer to financial advisor, explaining how military discipline informs his investment approach for clients.

• From buying savings bonds during military service to becoming a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch
• West Point education provided strong math and analytical skills that transferred well to finance
• NovaPoint specializes in dividend growth investing rather than high-yield strategies
• Uses covered call options to enhance income and create a disciplined sell methodology
• Targets companies raising dividends consistently, indicating disciplined financial management
• Firm values: experience, discipline, and integrity guide all client relationships
• Willing to accommodate client preferences while maintaining overall portfolio risk parameters
• Regular charitable giving to veterans' organizations including Children of Fallen Patriots
• Personally serves as treasurer for the US Army Ranger Association
• Emphasizes financial education and engagement with clients and family members

Check out NovaPoint Capital to learn more about our approach to dividend growth investing and disciplined risk management.

NovaPoint: https://novapointcapital.com/

 

Children of Fallen Patriots: https://www.fallenpatriots.org/

 

Special Operations Medical Association: https://specialoperationsmedicine.org/ 

 

Wreath Across America via Johns Creek: https://www.wreathsacrossamerica.org/pages/168142/overview/?Sid=168142%7C14806%7C0%7C4

 

U.S. Army Ranger Association: https://ranger.org/



Straight Talk for All - Nonsense for None

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Disclaimer - These podcasts are not intended as investment advice. Individuals please consult your own investment, tax and legal advisors. They provide these insights for educational purposes only.

Steve Davenport:

Hello everyone and welcome to Skeptic's Guide to Investing. Today we've got my friend and fellow advisor, Joe Sroka from Nova Point Capital, and Joe is a graduate of West Point, a CFA and, in general, just a really good guy. Just a really good guy. Today, unfortunately, our co-host, glenn Miller, is sick and he's working on getting his voice back, so we're going to have to just go it alone here and I think we'll have plenty of stuff to talk about and plenty of good ideas. So, Joe, I think that your background is very interesting, going to West Point and getting involved in registered investment advisor. Can you talk to me a little bit about how the military career started and then you ended up in this area? Or was it a family thing? Did your dad do financial advice or how did you come across, come into this business of money?

Joe Sroka:

Sure Great to be here, Steve. No, I was a freshman in high school when Ronald Reagan got elected president for the first time and if you remember, that was sort of the peace through strength movement that was. The Soviet Union is the evil empire, and you know, as a young man that you know was patriotic, I said, oh, you know, I'd love to be in the military and serve. You know, when I get out of college and I had the great opportunity to go to West Point and was commissioned a infantry officer in the United States Army and I was so bought in to some of the things that President Reagan talked about, that actually my first duty station after I went through training and other things, was in Berlin, Germany. So I was with the unit that was there and, the way I like to explain it, there was a wall when I got there and there was not a wall when I left. So mission accomplished.

Steve Davenport:

Did you have anything to do with tearing down the wall, or is that top secret information?

Joe Sroka:

No, well, from a physical standpoint, I have a very nice box of Berlin Wall relics at my home. But no, it was an interesting time. Certainly, the military changed a lot during that period. You know, the Cold War had ended and that was sort of the reason that you know, I then wound up leaving the military in the mid-1990s because I said well, you know, it seems like there's no more enemies left. Little did we know eventually what would. Well, you know, it seems like there's no more enemies left. Little did we know eventually what would happen, you know, in the global war on terror. But at that point it seemed like there were no enemies left and I said what else can I do with my skills?

Joe Sroka:

I had not been a very good investor. I'd been a good saver but not a good investor. So actually I would buy a savings bond out of my military pay every month. And when I left the Army, the US government mailed me a package of savings bonds and I said, ok, let me figure out what to do. And when I went to go, look for jobs, my first job was to be a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch in New Jersey and I knew nothing about investing. The Series 7 was my first entree to learning about investing so what did you major in college.

Joe Sroka:

I majored well, I have a bachelor of science degree in sociology, okay, but I have a great math background with engineering and math and physics and chemistry West Point are all kind of STEM folk before STEM was a word. So I sort of took that math skill and some other things and applied it to the financial world and what I discovered was I really liked it. I just didn't feel prepared to participate in the industry the level I wanted to. So after three years at Merrill Lynch I left. I went to business school at the University of Chicago, which was a fantastic experience that really brought sort of that math and STEM background I had and tied it into the financial world and we sort of really haven't looked back since.

Joe Sroka:

I know you and I said we'd talk about maybe like options and derivatives at some point during the podcast. Raghuram Rajan, who's now the dean at the University of Chicago, was my options professor. He later went on to be the governor of the Central Bank of India before coming back to the University of Chicago. So I had some top flight people teaching me about options and derivatives and then, you know, I sort of entered the institutional world.

Joe Sroka:

Originally I was a sell side research analyst at AB and Amro in Chicago went back to Merrill Lynch. I was in New York as a sell side analyst. I was the building products and home building analyst at Merrill Lynch for several years and I eventually decided I wanted to, you know, sort of be on the investment side of the ledger and worked at a couple of hedge funds and a couple of more traditional asset managers and, as you know, eventually my name's not on the door. But, metaphorically putting your name on the door, you have to sort of step out and start from zero again, and that's what we did 10 years ago with NovaPoint Capital and started that firm 2015 and have grown it ever since.

Steve Davenport:

Nice. I mean I think you guys have a very disciplined process because I think you both you know, but I think it's interesting that the firm has such a commitment to hiring veterans and building an organization, you think, with different skills. I mean NovaPoint does just about everything you would want from a firm in terms of wealth management right, the accounting, the planning, the investing, the advice about, you know, retirement and how to fund it and thinking about the different ways that people live their lives and how their money can go along with their values. I mean, I think that you guys have a a wonderful firm and I guess, um, I can talk about derivatives, but I I I feel like you guys are trying to do the best thing you can for your clients and similarly, I use derivatives for writing call options and and generating some extra premium.

Steve Davenport:

I've always tried to tell people that this is a risk reducer. I guess you feel similarly that what we're doing with derivatives can be a great way to supplement in these markets, especially a few years ago when there was no interest rate. Their interest rates were zero and you looked at these people and they said I still need income. How are we going to get it? Tell me a little bit about how you use derivatives and how you believe they should be used for clients.

Joe Sroka:

Sure. So if we take a half a step back, depending what side of the ledger you're on with any derivative product, right, they have different purposes. You can hedge, you can speculate or you can create income, and so where we use it is we use it in the hedging and generating income. So we use the simplest form of derivatives, we use covered call options. We're primarily an equity manager. We manage four different types of equity strategies and maybe this is a quick side step out into income.

Joe Sroka:

We run the dividend growth strategy, which is our primary strategy. The idea is not for dividend yield, it's for growth of dividend because, as we know, if you're a company that can grow your dividend consecutively for five years, 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, it probably means that again, you're a disciplined financial organization, as a corporation, you're not taking wild speculative bets with your balance sheet. You're growing your revenue every year, you're growing your cash flow every year, and then you can afford to continue raising your dividend. So we just see it as sort of a green flag and a virtuous cycle for companies that are able to consecutively raise their dividend for five or more years. But that doesn't necessarily produce high yield if you're growing your dividend a lot.

Joe Sroka:

So what we incorporated into that same strategy was writing covered calls, and we write the covered calls for the reasons we discussed. One it does generate more income for the portfolio. It does reduce some risk because basically we're selling off risk when we sell the covered call. But the other thing it does and I think traditionally this is what analysts have had a horrible time with and portfolio managers have a horrible time with is having a sell discipline. So what we'll typically do is we will write covered calls anywhere from 60 to 90 days, at least 10% higher than the current position, and ideally we're trying to find stocks where we're writing it at the price that if it reached that price, we'd be willing to let it go. So we use part of our sell discipline. So if we get called out unless there was something along the way so you have your option on for 90 days. Ideally it's going to expire If it blows through the strike price. Well, one of two things happened. One, the market got overly optimistic about the stock and we could let it go, or something fundamentally has changed with the company and now our price target would have gone higher. And if our price target goes higher, then what we'll either do is we'll roll that option forward to a higher strike another 60 or 90 days out, or, in some cases where you have to admit your mistakes, we'll just cover off the option and move on. But typically, more than 90% of the time our options are expiring, it's creating a little bit of extra income and month in, month out is taking a little bit of volatility off of the portfolio For folks that need more yield.

Joe Sroka:

What is not included in our dividend growth strategy? We buy no REITs and we buy no utility companies. We don't buy any REITs in that strategy because REITs don't necessarily grow their dividends as consistently as stocks and other sectors. So we do have a separate REIT portfolio and then we have a separate utility portfolio. Again, utility companies don't necessarily have that discipline of growing their dividends on an annual basis, so we can sort of mix and match portfolios together to create an investment strategy for each individual client. We also have fixed income, alan Conner, who's my co-founder at NovaPoint. He's been a bond trader in his previous life. So myself being primarily an equity investor and Alan being primarily a fixed income investor, we made a nice combo to start the firm and then we've continued to roll out investment strategies that you know, for the benefit of our clients. We're trying to, you know, focus on growth, focus on income, focus on a combination of the two, depending what they need.

Steve Davenport:

That sounds great. Can I ask you, when you decide to write a call, do you do it for the whole position, do you do it for half of the position and then later on put another half on? Or how do you decide that it's an all or nothing moment, or you just try to be consistent in everything and do the same amount.

Joe Sroka:

Yeah, so for the dividend growth portfolio, right now we own 34 positions, so let's for argument's sake, call it about. Each one's a 3% position, not every client. When we're mathing out that 3% position is going to have all round lots. Right, there's going to be an odd lot in there, so we'll write to the round lot. But, yeah, we'll write the whole position because we've determined that one of the conditions is being met, or all of the conditions are being met, that we're going to set a price 10% or higher for 60 to 90 days and we're going to pull in over that 60 to 90 days more than 50 basis points or about a 2% annualized yield. If we wrote, you know, 90 days four times over the course of the year, and typically what will happen is when we get you know really excited and put an option position on, all of those criteria are being met and they're being met in excess of that. So we've written you know positions where we're getting more than 1% over a 60-day period for maybe 15% up and we say, okay, if the stock moves that much in that time period, maybe that's our sell discipline and we're willing to get out of it.

Joe Sroka:

Cmt Chartered Market Technician. So what we do factor in when we're looking at the option positions is we'll look at RSIs and we'll look for overbought positions, ideally, and so one the stock's already had some optimism on it. We're going to take a step beyond that optimism to a level we'd be willing to sell at, and what happens a lot of times is maybe that stock's going to mark time and consolidate because it's made a move at.

Joe Sroka:

And what happens a lot of times is maybe that stock's going to mark time and consolidate because it's made a move higher and what we will do is we will have gotten compensated for owning that stock while it's marking time and consolidating a position.

Steve Davenport:

That's good. I know we have a little trouble. Sometimes you just fall in love with the name. My partner really loves Costco and I like Costco, but Costco just seemed to get so far above its moving average and outside of its bands. And I guess I want to say, do you find it hard sometimes to be in that position and be that disciplined? Because sometimes you do kind of? I always tell my partner that we date names, we don't marry them, that we have a relationship for a period with a name but we're not looking to settle down with any name. How do you feel about getting in and out of names like that? Do you find it hard to be completely unbiased?

Joe Sroka:

I find it hard to be unbiased in what I'm going to call core names. Okay, so when we put the portfolio together, let's just face it. There's some names that you know that you can own them for 10 and 20 years. You know the Microsofts and Walmarts and Apples. And we try not to be too cute with ourselves where we say, oh my God, you know Apple went up 12%, let's get out of it, Because we know, even if it pulls God, you know Apple went up 12%, let's get out of it, Because we know, even if it pulls back, you know it's a name you still want to own. Right it's. You know it's a high quality company, it's been raising its dividend. Let's go back to the original reason. We own things in the portfolio. Right, it's a high quality name, it's growing its revenue, it's growing its cash flow, it's growing its dividend.

Steve Davenport:

So, yeah, we do struggle a little bit of time with a core position where we say you know what, let's either roll the option out and now maybe we've created a, you know, 120 day or 180 day cycle where at some point along that line the stock's going to pull back and then the option's going to go off. Yep, I mean, we had an advisory meeting and somebody asked me why I held Microsoft in our global dividend strategy. And they said well, you know, you're only getting paid 0.6 or 0.7%, why own it? And I talked about dividend growth versus dividend and we talked about the strength of the brand, about dividend growth versus dividend, and we talked about the strength of the brand. And it's kind of hard to when you have 35 names and we have 40 names, you find it a little difficult to get the yield when you take one of those names. That's well below the average in yield.

Joe Sroka:

But you bring up an interesting point, and this is now that we've been running the strategy for over 10 years. A little thing that maybe it's hard to communicate with clients at the outset, but is the concept of yield on cost. So we have clients where we bought Microsoft 10 years ago.

Steve Davenport:

Yeah.

Joe Sroka:

Okay, once again, it had a one-handle dividend yield. It still has a one-handle dividend yield, but the dividends grown. I don't have the exact number in my head, but I mean it's grown in excess of 10% a year. And then what often we find is stocks trade at yield parity, or what I phrase is, if you're sort of a 1.5% dividend yield, you're always a 1.5% dividend yield, but you're growing your dividend in excess of 10% a year and your stock's going up in excess of 10% a year, and so what you really wind up with is capital appreciation accounts for more of the total return of the portfolio than the dividend yield.

Joe Sroka:

But also you'll look back and say, well, because the dividends grown so much, you know I may have a 7, 10, 12% yield on my original cost basis. Right, and if you think about it, you know, for clients that are eventually, you know growing wealth to retire or you know going to use income in the future, we're reinvesting all those dividends if money is not going out of the account and compounding and then at the same time, when you need to turn on the spigot at the other end, we've grown the cashflow potential of the portfolio over that 10 plus year period so that, relative to the original principle you put into the account, you're getting quite lucrative cash flow, instead of saying I locked myself into a 3% yield for life.

Steve Davenport:

Correct. I think it's great. I mean I believe in it and I think it's great the way you've implemented it. Can you just talk to me a little bit about NovoPoint and what you think the value add is? Or how do you look at it if somebody is on the street said, hey, what is NovoPoint really great at? I mean, is it the customer service? Is it the returns? Is it the risk management? Like, what is it that you would characterize as your strength, besides your good looks and personality that I know you and Alan are more than gifted in? If somebody wanted to not look at your pictures, but wanted to understand the firm I have a face for podcasting, steve.

Joe Sroka:

Come on. The tagline that we have for NovaPoint which you know wasn't dreamed up for marketing purposes, dreamed up to be genuine is experience, discipline and integrity, and I really think we do bring that to clients. Alan and I both had institutional-level careers before we opened a registered investment advisory firm. We are quite disciplined in our investment approach but that's because we're quite disciplined in our personal lives. As you mentioned, I'm a former US Army officer, west Point graduate. Alan's a triathlete which takes quite a bit of discipline, you know, to accomplish Ironman-level triathlete performance. So that same discipline that we have in our lives was the same discipline we bring into the investing. And then integrity the last one and I know in our modern world integrity is sometimes a hollow buzzword, but I've lived by the West Point Honor Code my entire life. I believe it. I share it with other people. I want to have business partners that buy into that and, yeah, we do treat our clients with the utmost integrity, aside from being a CFA or being a fiduciary, because we're RIAs.

Joe Sroka:

We tell people bad news when there's bad news to tell. We tell people good news when there's good news to tell. The way our investment performance works? Is we do very well in volatile periods of time? Is we do very well in volatile periods of time? 2018-19 was a good period of time for us. 2022 was a good period of time for us. We've won a couple of awards from the you know whatever things that follow portfolio managers, and one of the things we've won is what's referred to as a Bull Bear Award, where our upside capture is very stellar relative to our downside capture. That's great. So what we're really doing is we're trying to capture, you know, 90 plus percent of the market on the way up and you know we're then tracking less than 70% on the way down, and it's that combination, especially if you're going to be, you know, a multi-year investor.

Joe Sroka:

As I said, we've been running the strategy for over a decade that's really going to pay off over time is. You know it's nice to own all the hot, sexy stocks, but you know a lot of times you'll run yourself off a cliff when you do that. Stoned all the hot, sexy stocks, but you know a lot of times you'll run yourself off a cliff when you do that and, at the same time, you don't want to own only boring. You know. You know low growth stocks. So the ability to say I have a portfolio that can participate well on the upside, even if it doesn't get every last basis point, but at the same time, knowing that I'm not going to fall nearly as much on the market when we go into these typical rough periods whether it was something we saw earlier this year, you know. Or, like I said, interest rate cycles from the Fed back in you know 2018, you know when we had the inflation spike, you know it's good to know that you have a portfolio that's durable through cycles, and I think that's really what we do because of the discipline we can be durable through cycles.

Joe Sroka:

And then, just last thing, you know, my one personal philosophy is it's always the client's money. So we do work with our clients. You know two ways. That I think is somewhat unique. As much as you know, we're running set strategies. We will accommodate clients individual wishes. We have some clients that you know. I love this, joe, but I'm not owning any oil stocks, I'm not owning any defense stocks, et cetera. Or we also have the um. You know, I think like Tesla was a good example. Um, dividend growth I get it Sounds good, but I'm a Tesla fanatic and I own some of that in the same account and we'll do carve outs.

Joe Sroka:

And we have a sophisticated enough portfolio management system that we can run the rest of the strategy around some clients' individual wishes, because at the end of the day, like I said, it's their money.

Steve Davenport:

Correct.

Steve Davenport:

I think that's great because I think that a lot of us CFAs and some people in the industry just say well, if it's our best thinking, everybody needs to have our best thinking and I think that our best thinking is important.

Steve Davenport:

But it's also important that you get the right behavior from clients and if you get client buy-in to the names, then that buy-in means they'll probably behave better in a down market or they'll behave better in certain situations and ultimately, I think we both realize and you can disagree if you want but I think behavior of our clients is the main thing. We're trying to manage. The returns I think will come and go based on some periodicity, but how clients behave and feel about their portfolio. I mean I've become more of a behavioral investor than I have been a quant investor, because I really think that there is a portfolio out there that you feel good about and if you feel good about it, you feel good about the advisor who's doing the diligent work you're likely to be a better you know a better client on the long end and have better results.

Joe Sroka:

Yeah, and I think the thing that we concentrate on with risk management is we use some of the you know off the shelf software as a service risk software, and we will.

Joe Sroka:

We have the clients take the behavioral risk questionnaire at the beginning of the relationship and then every time there may be a significant change in life you know I'm now retiring, okay, well, how is my risk need to shift or how's my perception of risk need to shift? And then we try to manage the portfolio Because, as I said, we can stack, we can have dividend growth, we can have more growthy names, we can have utilities, we can have REITs, we can have fixed income and we manage to the risk number for the client. So when you're managing to the risk number like that, it's okay to say you're going to have one or two speculative positions that are important to you and that's also good because it keeps the clients engaged on investing. But then as long as we're dialing the overall portfolio risk into the range that suits the client's risk tolerance, then I feel we're doing a good thing and we're really working as partners.

Steve Davenport:

Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think one of the things I've noticed about NovaPoint is the integrity part. I think you guys take your integrity seriously and you take your clients and the relationship very seriously and you apply you know, as you do in your own lives a great deal of discipline and care and care. And one of the things I've always been interested in is your commitment to vets and the military, kind of compassionate capitalism. Can you talk a little bit about what your firm does to try to, you know, give back, Because I think that giving to your clients is one thing but also giving broader to the community, I think, sets another, you know, level of commitment.

Joe Sroka:

Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned that. So we do a couple of things. When we first started the firm, I said you know we, you know we should be charitable inclined. We're, you know, making money out in the economy. We should figure out a way to channel some of it to things that we care about. So, as you mentioned, I'm a veteran.

Joe Sroka:

Alan's son is an Army veteran as well.

Joe Sroka:

That was one of the first affinity points that struck up between Alan and I when we met and we said well, we all in our families ourselves or ourselves or our families are involved with veterans, so let's figure out ways to help veterans.

Joe Sroka:

So we sort of came up with you know, maybe it's a bit gimmicky, but we said you know what are sort of two important days in the year, and one of them is Veterans Day and the other one's Memorial Day. They have distinct purposes, you know, one is for people that we've lost and one is for all veterans. But we said that's probably a good time to, you know, celebrate what we care about. So we make donations roughly every six months because it winds up being May and November to several different veteran charities that we care about. That, you know, in many cases we're personally involved with, and I'll give you an example. One of them that we've, you know, given to you now for 10 straight years is Children of Fallen Patriots, a phenomenal organization that provides college scholarships to the children of, you know, soldiers, sailors, airmen that have lost their lives in the global war on terror.

Steve Davenport:

That's great.

Joe Sroka:

That I have a personal affinity to that. That organization was founded and is run by one of my West Point classmates and his wife, so I know the people that are running it personally. You talk about integrity and discipline. It's someone that and you know this is important in nonprofits we're giving money to a nonprofit to deploy and we trust the people that run that nonprofit right, so that integrity chain moves the whole way.

Joe Sroka:

We also do things locally. We're supporters of Wreaths Across America. That goes to the Veterans Cemetery in Canton, georgia, every December. So again, you know, making impact local. And then I personally, I have a volunteer job outside of my job at Nova Point. I'm the treasurer for the US Army Ranger Association and that's a national organization. We have 10 regions around the country and we provide financial assistance to rangers and their families if they need it. We provide scholarships to children of Army Rangers and we provide, you know, connecting events, you know, in the different regions for rangers to link up, ranger veterans to link up, you know, and have a community. The sort of tagline for the organization is, you know, connecting Army Rangers past, present and future. And that's what we really do. We've everything from World War Two Rangers up to Global War on Terror Rangers and we've created a community for them and, you know, work to financially enable that community.

Steve Davenport:

That's great. I mean I think that what you're doing is inspiring and I think it's great for others to see. I mean I'll try to include if you send me those URLs'll probably put them in the transcript so that people can check them out when they check out the podcast I think, that's great.

Steve Davenport:

Um, one question we ask a lot of our guests and just um, it's kind of I mean, this is probably the last question is how, how do you get experience with money and do you have anything in your money story that if you could say to Joe, who's 20, joe, here's what you learned and you'd like somebody who comes behind you to try to do differently? Can you just give us a little taste? Did your family talk about money when you were growing up? Did you? Did you have a kind of taboo topics that you, you wanted to leave dinner in one piece? So you, you talked about things this way, or you? You know, I know that family dinner tables and ideas about money can be somewhat difficult to get through.

Joe Sroka:

Yeah, so I grew up in New Jersey. My father, well, you know, far from a wealthy man, he had not even been a high school graduate, he was a bartender in New York City. He was actually a fairly famous bartender in New York City. There's New York Times stories about him at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, which is fairly famous. So he's a well-known bartender. But even if you're a well-known bartender, that's a lot different in Midtown than working downtown on Wall Street. And then my mother was a school nurse.

Joe Sroka:

So I grew up, you know I'm going to call it fairly humble backgrounds. We weren't, you know, destitute or anything. But you know, I think what my parents did instill in me everything from sort of the, you know, mowing lawns and washing cars. You know, when you're a teenager and getting a job, I think I've always, just, you know, been inspired by them to work and contribute, and I'm very happy. I have two daughters. They have a lot better financial education than I had starting out because I'm their dad. So you know, I've gotten them interested in understanding.

Joe Sroka:

You know, why do you own this stock or that stock in your account? And my younger daughter is the one that's taken to it a little bit more. She has selected some of the stocks for her account. So when you get to the making accommodations for clients that you know really care about one stock. With my daughter we do the same thing. We own some of the stocks that I think are good for her and she owns some of the stocks that she thinks is good for her. But she hasn't done bad.

Steve Davenport:

No, my son and I do the same thing and I think it's one of the best parts of our relationship is that he really does care about. He just sent me a text the other day. He says have you thought about any investments in the nuclear area? And I was like, oh boy, you know, like my clients don't send me questions like that, but he does, you know.

Joe Sroka:

That's a great dialogue to have and whether it's the dialogue I have with my own daughters or the dialogue we have with clients, I think people being engaged in the thought of investing it does a couple of things for them. One, it makes the relationship with the money manager real. This person is really working on my behalf because I'm actually seeing what they're doing and I'm learning about the names that they're buying. But second, in some situations it keeps folks from getting ripped off. My biggest I don't know disgust about the industry that we're in is there are plenty of unscrupulous people and there are plenty of people that don't believe it's the client's money, as we found out over time. And you know I try to, you know, hopefully steer people away from those situations and we're glad that everyone that works with us you know, like I said, we're good fiduciaries. We think we're, you know, treating them with the utmost integrity and we're trying to provide an education element that really binds them to us so that they can have a good experience and a good financial future.

Steve Davenport:

Unfortunately, my son's also very good at looking back with regret and he's reminded me about the Bitcoin at $20,000 that we didn't buy, about the Bitcoin at 20,000 that we didn't buy, and I've told him I still don't understand how the value is determined, so I'm not going to buy it. And he's mentioned something about my age and my mental abilities, but I'm not going to probably go through it in detail, but I think that you have to discuss some of the things that don't you know. I mean, yes, I said to him if you want to take a flyer and take a certain percent and put it in there, knock yourself out, but I'm not. You know what I mean. I'm not in agreement and and I think it's um, you know, I mean the there's, there's there's lots of different colors in the world and everybody kind of gravitates towards different names and different things.

Steve Davenport:

And I think at his age, maybe you know Bitcoin is a good lesson or maybe there's something there that's going to help him further down the line. But that's the one regret investment we've had. But he's had some good luck with NVIDIA and Microsoft and Oracle. He's a very tech-oriented investor and so now he's thinking about broadening and having a little bit of gold and having some other things. So I think it's great just because I believe that when I was growing up, we didn't really talk about you know what, how much money you should save and how much, how much should you spend and you know what. And I think that now, having those discussions, you realize that it does make everyone you know what I mean. It's it's not a comfortable topic, but the fact that you're having it in means feels like it's a deeper and better relationship.

Joe Sroka:

Yeah, I think any form of communication you have with your kids is great, whether it's around sports, whether it's around investing, whether it's around different activities. Graduated from college this past year, when she graduated from high school, we bought her several hundred dollars of Bitcoin as her high school graduation present and she still owns it and she's quite happy. But she also owns, you know, microsoft and Walmart and some other things in her investment account. So, again, it's a good balance and keeps her engaged and, you know, sort of always welcomes the mind to new ideas. You know there's an intellectual capital, business and intellectual capital can't be stale. You have to continually read and learn and, you know, be open to new ideas and evolve. Evolve is a good word. A good word, yes.

Steve Davenport:

Okay, I mean this is evolving, so I'd like to wrap up. I mean this is evolving, so I'd like to wrap up. What final?

Joe Sroka:

comments. Do you have Anything, Joe, about the business or personnel lead or you're?

Steve Davenport:

involved. How satisfied are you when you do things with the volunteering? It seems like you do a lot of volunteering, so you must feel a certain affinity or joy you're getting from those things.

Joe Sroka:

Yeah, I'm a big believer and you know I've done different things over my life.

Joe Sroka:

You know, for those familiar with, you know, atlanta, you know, when my daughters were young, I, you know, coached soccer at Top Hat, even though I didn't know anything about soccer.

Joe Sroka:

But at their age it really didn't make a difference. But you know, I think you know we have, you know, resources that are finite, right, you know money is a finite resource, time is a finite resource, and you know we can contribute our time and we can contribute our money to different things. You might as well contribute them to things that you enjoy, where you make an impact, that you get satisfaction back from. So, whether it's, like you mentioned, charitable giving to veterans organizations or, you know, doing things in the local community, it's important to do things that you feel you're making an impact. I think the biggest problem, you know maybe nonprofit organizations and other organizations that rely on volunteers if it's not a good experience for the volunteer, they're going to stop volunteering, you know. So I think being involved in organizations that you identify with, you believe in and you get satisfaction from working with goes a long way to keeping people engaged, and then the longer people are engaged, the better the impact is.

Steve Davenport:

That's great. Thank you, joe. So, listeners, I appreciate you listening and we'd love you to like and share Skeptic's Guide, and if you have any comments, please reach out and we'll try to put some of the things that Joe's involved with in our notes. So check it out and please listen. We got some great guests coming up, so thank you everybody and have a great day.

People on this episode

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Clem Miller, CFA

Co-host
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Steve Davenport, CFA

Co-host

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