Stefan Sharkansky: The Retirement Rule That Leaves Too Much Money Behind

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Our guest on the podcast today is Stefan Sharkansky. Stefan is a Ph.D. statistician who specializes in finance. He wrote a provocatively titled paper, “The Only Other Spending Rule Article You Will Ever Need,” which was published in the Financial Analyst Journal. Stefan has also developed a related website called, The Best Third, designed to help people with their retirement spending plans and portfolio structures. In addition, he developed and operates the website PersonalFund.com, which provides proprietary cost analysis of mutual funds to financial advisors. Stefan has a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Washington.

Episode Highlights

• Why the 4% Rule Can Lead to Underspending
• TIPS Ladders vs. Retirement Annuities
• Reducing Fixed Spending and Stock Allocation
• Why Individual TIPS Beat TIPS Funds
• A Formula for Stock Portfolio Withdrawals
• Historical Returns vs. Monte Carlo Simulations
• Should Retirees Diversify Globally?
• Leaving a Bequest Without Underspending

If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at TheLongView@Morningstar.com.

Transcript

Christine Benz: Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I’m Christine Benz, director of personal finance and retirement planning for Morningstar. Our guest on the podcast today is Stefan Sharkansky. Stefan is a Ph.D. statistician who specializes in finance. He wrote a provocatively titled paper, “The Only Other Spending Rule Article You Will Ever Need,” which was published in the Financial Analyst Journal. Stefan has also developed a related website called, The Best Third, designed to help people with their retirement spending plans and portfolio structures. In addition, he developed and operates the website PersonalFund.com, which provides proprietary cost analysis of mutual funds to financial advisors. Stefan has a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.S. in computer science from Stanford University, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Washington. Stefan, welcome to The Long View.

Stefan Sharkansky: Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here.

Benz: Well, we’re delighted to have you here, and we do want to delve into your work on retirement planning. But before we do that, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about your background. You have your doctorate in statistics. What got you interested in investing and especially retirement planning?

Sharkansky: Well, I’ve been interested in investing for a long time, and my doctorate in statistics is with a focus on financial econometrics. So I have the domain knowledge about finance and investing. And the retirement planning specifically came from a very personal experience. A few years ago, my wife asked me how much could we spend in retirement? And I said, “Well, gosh, I have no idea, but let me research that.” And that got me into this rabbit hole of figuring out what is the best methodology for retirement planning; that is, planning for the actual spending part of the retirement as opposed to the preretirement planning. And that got me here.

Benz: Let’s talk about the application that you’ve created. It’s called the Best Third, and this best third idea is something that you come back to. Can you maybe just give us a little background on how you’re using that term and what it means?

Sharkansky: Yeah, it means that you could think of your life as having three thirds. The first third is when you’re growing up and going to school. The second third is when you’re working and raising kids. And then the third third is when you’re in retirement. And the website is about helping you make the best of what should be the best third of your life.

Benz: In the paper, which was published in the Financial Analyst Journal, you talk about the kind of research shortcut that many have used in Bill Bengen’s seminal research that starts with that 4% guideline. But you, in the paper, are quite critical of those fixed rate spending systems because they lead to underspending, sometimes dramatically so. So people deprive themselves, effectively, during their retirement periods. Can you talk about that?

Sharkansky: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, Bill Bengen and the 4% rule deserves a lot of credit because it was the first systematic approach for spending down a retirement portfolio, really. But it has come under criticism from a number of researchers and thought leaders over the years for a few reasons. And one is because, whether it’s 4% or whatever the fixed rate happens to be, people’s spending and tax situations during retirement isn’t really constant. So having a constant withdrawal rate doesn’t really fit the way people actually need to spend.

And another part of it is, as you mentioned, is the underspending. And I found in researching the paper and running through the numbers with historical scenario data is that, in a median market scenario, if you follow the 4% rule, you would end up, your 30-year retirement plan, with half again as much wealth as you started with, adjusted for inflation. What that means is that you are not spending as much as you could and you are leaving so much on the table for your heirs that you’re not able to enjoy the quality of life in retirement that you can truly afford.

Benz: Our research very much corroborates that same finding, that those fixed real withdrawal systems, and we use Monte Carlo simulations, but they oftentimes lead to very large leftover balances. And I sometimes hear from retirees who say, “Well, I’m not too worried about that because I have children, grandchildren,” but it does seem like, at a minimum, people are losing some opportunities for lifetime giving, right?

Sharkansky: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I’m a big believer in the concept of “give with a warm hand, if you can.” That is make your gifts to charity and to your family members while you’re still alive instead of waiting until the end of your life.

Benz: Yeah, me, too. And also the data show that people, when they inherit money from their [parents], are often in their late 50s, early 60s. Their financial fortunes are pretty well set by that life stage. I want to delve into your research, which builds on some research from Larry Siegel, who’s previously been a guest on this podcast, as well as M. Barton Waring. And it’s called ARVA, the system that Siegel and Waring discussed in their paper, or annually recalculated virtual annuity. Can you discuss what ARVA is?

Sharkansky: Yeah. It uses the word “annuity,” and it tries to provide the main benefits of an

, a steady and more or less predictable income stream while you’re alive. And it contains two parts. One is a ladder of TIPS, , which provides a level of secure guaranteed, the closest thing to riskless guaranteed income that we have in the investment markets. Along with, in the case of my paper, I’d included a stock portfolio, where the withdrawals from the stock portfolio are amortized, and we can get into that details a little bit later, but it’s a formula for withdrawing from the stock portfolio in such a way that you’re mathematically guaranteed that you will not run out of money, but the withdrawals from the stock portfolio will vary with market performance. You take a larger withdrawal when the market’s done well and a smaller withdrawal when the market has lagged a bit.

Benz: While we’re on the topic of annuities, I wanted to follow up on, so why TIPS versus an annuity? Just a simple income annuity that will last throughout someone’s lifetime. Can you compare and contrast those two different tools, which would seem to serve a similar function?

Sharkansky: Yeah, they aim to serve a similar function, and an annuity has the advantage that it is guaranteed to last your lifetime. And you also benefit from the longevity risk pooling, sometimes called “mortality credits,” because people live different lifespans. And so the withdrawals that you can take as an individual kind of average out. And so for many people, you can take a larger withdrawal while you’re alive than you would if you set aside all the assets you needed to plan for a long lifespan. But that comes with a very big cost, which is inflation risk. And there are not on the market today any annuities which are truly indexed for inflation. And inflation is a big risk in retirement, especially if you’re trying to plan for a very long lifespan, which is why you would have an annuity in the first place. And so your purchasing power from your annuity payouts will decline pretty precipitously toward the end of your life.

Allan Roth had a really nice article about this on Morningstar last month where he compared annuities, which don’t have the inflation protection with a TIPS ladder, which does have inflation protection. And he concluded pretty decisively in favor of the TIPS ladder.

Benz: Yeah, I know Allan has been banging the drum for TIPS for a long time, as have many folks in the Bogleheads community. I’ve heard working financial planners say that academics’ focus on TIPS puts too fine a point on retirement spending, that, in reality, many of their clients’, even their fixed, spending might move around pretty significantly during their retirement years. So one planner mentioned to me that she has clients who maybe sell second homes, and so their expenses go dramatically down because they’re no longer paying for upkeep for their second home. What do you say to that? This idea of looking closely at our budget and trying to address those fixed spending needs with TIPS maybe puts too fine a point on things.

Sharkansky: Well, if you approach it that way, then yeah, I completely agree that, because your fixed spending is likely to vary in ways that you don’t anticipate from the outset, and so I don’t think it makes sense to try to plan your spending too much. There are diminishing returns for doing that. And in my mind, the TIPS ladder is not there to fund your essential needs exactly. It’s there to provide you with a secure base spending that you can count on, but it doesn’t have to be a precise forecast of your exact spending.

Benz: You thought to address a couple of issues that weren’t specifically addressed in that ARVA research. And one was this idea of, if I’m allocating to TIPS for those fixed expenses and to stocks for everything else, how to set that allocation. Can you talk about how you approached that?

Sharkansky: Yeah. The paper approaches it, as you’d expect from an academic paper, with a good deal of formalism. But in practice, what I would say is you start with just what level of secure guaranteed income do you want? And you create the TIPS ladder to provide that level of income, and it just follows from there. The allocation just follows from there. You can specify with the TIPS ladder what spending you want in each year. And you could say, “Well, I just want a constant level of real income of, say, $100,000 every year, including TIPS and Social Security.” And then you would match the TIPS ladder to provide the total cash flows from interest payments and bond principal repayments upon maturity to match that level of income. And different people will have different comfort levels. Some people will want to have that secure income cover what they believe to be their fixed needs. And others will say, “I just want some reasonable floor, and you know you’re going to get additional income from the stock portion of the portfolio.” And some people would be more comfortable having the more upside from the stock portfolio at the cost of a little less certainty.

Benz: In the paper, you discuss using individual TIPS bonds, the latter TIPS portfolio, which is what you prefer versus using TIPS funds, so bundles of TIPS that are managed either in an ETF or mutual fund. You favor the individual bond portfolio. Can you talk about that?

Sharkansky: Yeah, absolutely. And so you have the individual TIPS bonds, and the important thing is that you hold them to maturity. Because when you hold a TIPS to maturity, you know pretty exactly, with as much certainty as anybody can have with anything in the stock market, that when those bonds mature, you are going to get a known quantity of funds returned to you in cash that is adjusted for inflation. But with the individual bonds, you can know with high certainty exactly what you’re going to be getting in terms of spendable income over the next 30 years.

But with TIPS, ETFs, or funds, you don’t have that same certainty. Those are volatile assets that fluctuate. As interest rates change, the value of those funds will go up and down just like any other bond fund. And if interest rates go up, then the value of the bond funds, the TIPS funds that you own, will decline, and therefore you cannot get certain withdrawals from those funds.

Benz: Following up on that, in the paper, you take pains to note that TIPS yields will be ephemeral, that the real yield that you receive over your particular drawdown period will be kind of luck of the draw depending on the interest rate environment. Does right now—and not wanting you to be a market-timer—but does it seem like an especially lucrative or opportune time to buy TIPS right now? One of our guests recently made that point that he felt like TIPS were being woefully underrecognized.

Sharkansky: Yeah, I agree with your guest’s point. And just to clarify, the yield on your TIPS ladder is ephemeral, but it is locked in at the outset. Once you buy your TIPS ladder at a particular yield, it’s fixed for you for the next 30 years. You’re immune from changes in that real yield once you’ve bought your ladder. And yes, now is a particularly favorable time to buy a TIPS ladder. The real yields on the long-term bonds are about 2.8%, which is historically quite high, and it is a favorable time to be buying those TIPS.

Benz: Yeah. Just to clarify on the fleeting nature of TIPS yields, I guess my point was that, if I retire in 10 years, I may be looking at a completely different situation.

Sharkansky: Exactly. Yes.

Benz: Yeah. So TIPS are tax-inefficient, that we generally want to hold them in something that is going to shelter us from the distributions that they’re making. I was reading some posts on the Bogleheads forum, and there were some comments from early retirees who were saying, “Well, even though I like the concept, this isn’t that useful to me because I’m not yet 59 and a half. I can’t withdraw from my IRAs.” Have you thought about, it sounds like maybe you’re working on an approach that would help younger retirees?

Sharkansky: Yeah. And Bogleheads, first of all, is a great forum. I learn a lot from participating in those discussions.

But yet TIPS, like all other bonds, are not tax-efficient. So when you have a choice of where to locate your stocks, where to locate your bonds, bonds should always be located in your tax-deferred accounts where you’re not as concerned about the income that they throw off that’s bad in a taxable account. And also they’re slower growing so you have the opportunity cost to put your higher-earning assets in the taxable and tax-exempt accounts where you can make the most of that growth.

But when you don’t have a choice, your only option is to use a taxable account before you get to the 59 and a half, or unless you have one of the exceptions to early withdrawals, then your set of options is limited. If you want the stability of bond income, then you’re going to have to eat the tax inefficiency. Otherwise, you could be all in stocks, which are more tax-efficient, but with the downside they’re more volatile, and the withdrawals are going to be less predictable.

But TIPS have certain tax disadvantages even relative to nominal bonds, but it actually all comes out in the wash, I think, because with nominal bonds, you have to worry about inflation. With TIPS, you don’t have to worry about inflation. So you either pay slightly higher taxes on the TIPS or you pay the hidden tax of inflation on your nominable bonds. With muni bonds, well, they don’t have the same negative tax consequences, but they’re still nominal, so you’re still at risk for inflation. And also, unless you’re in a very high tax bracket, your aftertax yields on munis will not be as good as your aftertax yields on other kinds of bonds.

So based on the options that are available to you in a taxable account, TIPS may still be the best of the available options for you even in early retirement when you have to hold them in a taxable account.

Benz: Yeah. I was talking to a planner friend, not about your tool specifically, but she builds a portfolio of laddered nominal bonds with a little bit of cushion or wiggle room built in to address fluctuations in household spending. What do you think of that approach—of not using TIPS but instead using nominal bonds plus a buffer?

Sharkansky: Without knowing more about the details of how this planner approaches that, it’s hard for me to imagine how nominal bonds would be more effective even in combination with something else, how it would be more effective or more straightforward than simply using a TIPS ladder to provide stable income with inflation protection.

Benz: Yeah, I think the thought was that it enabled her to get slightly higher yields and maybe better diversification across different bond sectors, but I can’t speak to it either, specifically.

Wanted to switch over to discuss the risky components. So we’ve talked about TIPS, and that’s the allocation that I might make to meet my fixed living expenses. Then with this risky portfolio, we’re putting any leftover assets into stocks. You’ve arrived at a 100% equity weighting for that portion of that portfolio, not a balanced portfolio or anything else. Can you talk about how you got there?

Sharkansky: Yeah, absolutely. I did, in the paper, I looked at different combinations of stocks and bonds. The more traditional style of 60/40, 80/20, 40/60, a few different blends. And I found that the 100% stock portfolio was not any riskier in the sense of downside than the blended portfolios, but they had significantly higher upside. The withdrawals you would get from the 100% stock portfolio were more volatile and variable, but that variability was all on the upside, not on the downside. Simply put, there’s no benefit and a cost to including bonds in that portion of the portfolio.

But having said that, sometimes people look at this and say, “Oh, 100% stocks, that seems very risky. No bonds in there.” Well, in fact, you have bonds in the forms of your TIPS ladder. So you still have, with this approach, you still have a blended portfolio of stocks and bonds. It’s just that the way you hold those bonds is in the form of a TIPS ladder as opposed to the more traditional bond fund.

Benz: Yeah, that makes sense. So in terms of calculating that payday from the equity portfolio, can you walk us through how that would work?

Sharkansky: Yeah. So there’s a formula that’s used to calculate the withdrawals. Say, you do annual withdrawals, you make the withdrawals each year, and it’s an amortization formula. It’s very similar to the formula that is used for calculating your payments on a residential mortgage. It is designed to, in the case of the mortgage, pay back the loan with interest over a fixed period of time. In the case of a mortgage with a constant payment every month.

So the same formula is applied to your stock portfolio with the assumption that, the formula is developed with the assumption that you have a known fixed return on the stock asset over the lifetime that you hold it. And of course we know that the return isn’t going to be fixed, but the formula calculates based on the assumption of a fixed return, and it computes the percentage for every year, based on the number of years you have left in your plan, what percentage would you withdraw from your stock portfolio on the simplified assumption that the return is going to be fixed? And that gives you a fixed percentage to work with every year that you calculate from the outset.

I create my plan now, and I know that 10 years from now, I withdraw exactly—I’m just making up a number, I don’t have the exact number in front of me—I withdraw exactly 9% of whatever is the value of that portfolio in year 10. So we have these fixed percentages based on that amortization formula. Now, of course, in reality, the returns are going to vary over time. So we’ll just take out the 9% that particular year of whatever the value is. So that actual dollar value is unpredictable, but the percentage value is predictable.

And so because we’re taking out these fixed percentages over time, we know that we can’t possibly ever run out of money, but the value that we withdraw in terms of dollar value is going to vary every year based on whatever the market performance has been up to that time.

Benz: The system addresses sequence risk in that way and that I would be constrained to whatever percentage I’ve laid out for myself if I happen to hit a sequence of bad returns on that equity portfolio.

Sharkansky: That’s right. You have a sequence of bad returns, you’re just going to take out a smaller dollar value every year. On the other side, if you happen to have a great sequence of returns, you get to spend more or give away more to your family and charity.

Benz: Right. So you employ historical returns in your analysis. Why do you think they’re better than using Monte Carlo simulations?

Sharkansky: Yeah, that’s a great question. And this was the one aspect of the paper that was most informed by my education as a statistician.

When you do a Monte Carlo simulation of market returns or any kind of simulation, it depends on having a mathematical model of how the world works that describes the world reasonably well and how market returns behave over time. And if you don’t have an accurate model, if your assumptions aren’t correct, then what you’re simulating, the predictions of the simulation, will only be so useful.

And unfortunately, we simply do not have a really good model of how market returns behave over the long term. They don’t follow a really clean, well-understood process. They’re random, but there’s also an element of unpredictability in returns that is more unpredictable than a lot of the clean mathematical simulation thinking. And so these assumptions that go into the kind of Monte Carlo assumptions that nearly everybody does is based on certain model assumptions that don’t actually map very well to the way markets have actually behaved. I’ll use a hard core statistical term here. We’re assuming that returns on stocks and bonds are what’s called “IID bivariate normal.” Some listeners will know what that means, but it’s a simplifying assumption that doesn’t really explain how markets have actually behaved in the past.

And for example, one key thing, which I point out in the paper, is that stock market returns have long-term mean reversion, which means that you have a runup like the dot-com bubble, and it was followed by a correction, the dot-com bust. And then the dot-com bust was followed by a long runup. Similarly, after the stock market crash of 1929, it was a big crash, but then stocks returned. So stocks always return to something of a mean level. And that’s not captured in any of the Monte Carlo simulation paradigms that I’ve seen. And it does, in fact, lead—and I point this out in the paper—it leads to the fact that simulations will provide different results than markets have actually performed in the past.

And the specific example I gave in the paper is that the classical model of IID bivariate normal would’ve assumed that there’s more downside risk to a 100% stock portfolio than to, say, a blended 60/40 portfolio when, in the historical record, the opposite is actually true. Because of the mean reversion, stocks have had a lower downside risk than this classical modeling paradigm of Monte Carlo simulation would’ve predict. So that’s why I looked at the historical returns to see how markets have actually behaved instead of simulations. And we know that the future is not going to match exactly any conclusion of a simulation, and it’s not going to match the historical record, any particular plus scenario in the historical record exactly.

But I believe that looking at the historical record of 150 years, which is the dataset that I used, it gives us, I think, a realistic range of the possibilities of how markets might behave in the future. And so unless you’re convinced that the future is going to be far worse than anything we’ve seen in the past 150 years, including two World Wars and the Great Depression, etc., then the range of what we’ve seen in the past will be a reasonable guide to the range that you might see in the future.

Benz: I wanted to follow up on the mean reversion piece especially, because you do use US equities as the core kind of risk asset, and it seems, by many accounts, the US market is quite expensive today. Sequence risk could be a real consideration for new retirees. Can you talk about that, that perhaps your work has an overly rosy view of how the US market might perform in the future, even over a 30-year drawdown, given how extended US valuations appear to be today?

Sharkansky: I have no view, rosy or not, about what the US market is going to do in the future. I have absolutely no idea. And the methodology that I describe doesn’t depend on any particular view of the market. You take a particular percentage out every year, and if the markets do well, you’ll get more. If the markets do less, you won’t get as much, but you will always get something. And again, unless the future of the market is far worse than anything we’ve seen over the last 150 years, history provides us with a reasonable range of what you might experience.

Benz: I wanted to follow up just on US versus global, taking just a US total stock market index, which is the approach that you would support versus using some sort of a total global market index. Can you discuss what you see as the pros and cons of US versus being more global?

Sharkansky: Yeah. Well, first of all, the paper only looks at US returns because that’s the data that I had available to me. There’s a wonderful free open source dataset of US stock and bond returns going back to 1871. It was compiled by Professor Robert Shiller of Yale, Nobel Prize winner, and it’s a terrific dataset that a lot of people use. So that was an easy way to get data on the US stock market.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a comparable dataset for non-US markets. If there were, I would’ve used that in the paper and analyzed that as well. So that’s why the paper focuses on the US markets. It’s strictly a matter of data availability. And I think it’s entirely reasonable for people who want global diversification to use a global fund. I just don’t have the data to give me the historical range of what the returns on that might be.

But I just did want to leave a point that other researchers have looked at international markets—Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton, known as DMS; they’re three British academics. They looked at long-term historical returns going back to 1900 of US and international, and they found that the US market did outperform international markets fairly substantially and without any greater risk. And in today’s markets, with the integration of global economies and multinational corporations, the US market returns and the international market returns, they’re pretty highly correlated. So it’s not clear how much diversification it would actually give you.

And this is my personal belief only, and I wouldn’t try to convince people of this necessarily, but I think there are structural differences between the US economy and other countries that our regulatory environment, our degree of innovation that kind of does favor the US. There is something of American exceptionalism. But again, it’s entirely reasonable to want global diversification, and that’s another very reasonable choice for using this methodology is to use a global fund instead of a US-only fund.

Benz: The system that you’ve developed is meant to address lifetime consumption, so to encourage people to spend what they’ve managed to save. Can you talk about how one might use this approach if they have a very strong desire to leave a bequest after they’re gone? How would it interact with a bequest motive?

Sharkansky: Yeah, absolutely. The paper contemplates but doesn’t go into much detail with a bequest motive. But the website that I developed to help people implement this methodology, it does allow you to specify a bequest motive. You can specify a legacy reserve. That would come from the stock portion of your portfolio. If you want to leave, be absolutely certain you’re going to leave a particular bequest, then you can also add that to your TIPS ladder, make sure that the end of your TIPS ladder has a certain extra amount for your bequest. But typically people will take the bequest from their stock portfolio, which has the most opportunity for growth, and you can set a particular dollar amount that should be left in your portfolio at the end of your plan.

And so people think of it as a bequest, but it can also be used as an end-of-life reserve in case you either live much longer than you had anticipated, you’ll have a reserve leftover for yourself, or if you need end-of-life care, that’s expensive, that reserve can serve that purpose as well. And with whatever is not spent will go to your estate.

Benz: Yeah, that’s helpful. Kind of a fourth bucket, as I’ve talked about it. I wanted to talk about whether there are any other additional aspects of retirement planning that fascinate you that seem kind of like unplowed terrain and that we might expect to see you working on in the future.

Sharkansky: Right now, my focus is on the best third and improving that experience and adding a lot more capabilities to that platform on things like Roth conversions and management of your withdrawals over time and just a richer, more complete user experience, handle the specific needs of early retirees and the different options that they have. SIP plans to enable them to tap their retirement funds earlier than 59 and a half.

Benz: Yeah, I will say I had fun playing around with the tool. I appreciated the output. It made sense to me, and I also appreciated the attention to the tax character of our household portfolio assets and sort of made recommendations about how we would allocate them. So I thought it was a very cool tool.

One question we’ve been putting to a lot of our guests is who are their go-to reads or listens, whether columnists or podcasts? Can you talk about where you go for information?

Sharkansky: Oh, absolutely. First of all, you folks at Morningstar. You do terrific work on this subject, and I send out a biweekly newsletter to the users of the Best Third, and I always include links to other articles, and I’ve linked to several you’ve written recently. Other writers I like I’ve mentioned already. Allan Roth, who writes in different places, including sometimes at Morningstar. And then from The Wall Street Journal, I also like Anne Turgerson and Jason Zweig.

Benz: Yeah, they all do an amazing job. Last question for you, Stefan, is you were on Jeopardy, and you actually won quite a nice-sounding trip from that experience. Can you talk about that?

Sharkansky: Yeah, so that was a lot of fun. That was in 1994. And yeah, before Jeopardy, I studied. I read so many trivia books to just cram my brain. And then when I got to the actual show, nothing that I studied was actually helpful.

Benz: A lot like life, huh?

Sharkansky: A lot like life, yeah. It was such a fun experience, though. Alex Trebek was such a gracious and charming host, just like he, appeared on TV. The hardest thing about playing Jeopardy was getting the clicker. I tried to click and it was just really hard for some reason to get called. But my one regret is not betting all my money in Final Jeopardy. Had I bet all of my money in Final Jeopardy, I would’ve tied for first on the cash and go on to play again. But I did come in second and had a wonderful trip to St. Thomas.

Benz: Amazing. Well, congratulations on that and on this research. Thank you so much for being here with us, Stefan.

Sharkansky: Well, thank you very much, Christine. I really enjoyed it.

Benz: Thank you. Thank you for joining us on The Long View. If you could, please take a moment to subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on social media at Christine Benz on LinkedIn or at @christine_benz on X.

George Castady is our engineer for the podcast. Jessica Bebel produces the show notes each week, and Jennifer Gierat copy edits our transcripts. Finally, we’d love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or a guest idea, please email us at thelongview@morningstar.com. Until next time, thanks for joining us.