Introvert-, Hippie- and Vagabond-Freedom

There are many types of financial freedom. The types of freedom are important, because our ideas about freedom put limits on our careers and implicitly sets a goal for our stash. 

What kind of life do we want to live? How sure do we want to be that we reach it? And what are we ready to sacrifice to get there?

Hole-in-my-Soul Freedom

No Entrance is Grande Enough
(Opéra Garnier Paris 1867, le grand escalier)

The most consuming kind of freedom is, as we all know, the never-is-enough-freedom; the kind of freedom that cannot be achieved even when one stands on one of the terraces of one's Penthouse, alone, at 70 years of age, silently looking out on the streets below. 

It's the Freedom of Imbalance, and an consuming one. The only capital on one's life's journey has been monetary. 

Where does the hole in the soul that needs to be filled with kitsch, in its many disguises, come from? Perhaps very poor beginnings, or at least a belief that one's beginnings were very poor, and then life turns into an everlasting revenge on that poor beginning.

The hole in the soul wants more, at the expense of all other sides of life.

Do you feel that enough is never enough? Well, at some point the money is better spent on a shrink than on more brilliant furnishings.

Joneses Freedom

Another kind of freedom is the one that is lived in relation with the closest social group that happened to be at hand: childhood friends, colleagues, neighbours and influences from media, social or otherwise. 

The common denominator is that the social group is not a conscious choice. They were just available, or imposed.

Freedom becomes what is reflected back from that unconsciously imposed social group: having that house, the two cars, better children, a better husband, more sanity, better work and better vacation. All in comparison to that group one happens to compare oneself with.

One becomes Ayn Rand's "Second Hander" who can only perceive oneself through the mirror of others. 

Introvert Freedom

A solution to the Hole-in-the-Soul and the Joneses is to go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. 

Cast all possible allure of the social mirror overboard. Let's not even be tempted to compare oneself with other people's social values, because, well, let's scrap social, shall we?

Especially easy if one is a stark introvert, who only needs the tiniest of external stimuli to be content. 

Hermit cave, Spain.

By Basotxerri - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Financial freedom now becomes easy. There really isn't much need for money at all, so financial independence is almost automatically achieved. There are very few interactions with other people where money could even be needed.

Freedom, at last. 

As long as the hens survive the winter.

Hippie Freedom

Another kind of freedom is the one where one still participates in the arena of social life, but one is content with being a lot ... stranger than the Joneses.

Here one must put up with the scorn one will inevitable receive by not following the rules.

In many senses of the word, one is a hippie, a non-conformist, an epicurean; like the philosopher content with one's cheese.

Perhaps one can survive the social stigma by associating with something else, like the fire-moment, or some other kind of subculture, to build another, parallel but different pyramid of social recognition.

One is still connected with the world around, and one is not afraid to act in the arena, but in other ways, and not wanting to receive the usual kind of social recognition. 

And with that parallel value pyramid, one will probably start to value new things in life, more independently; be it the small things, the long runs, the good food and the peculiar hobby.

Vagabond Freedom

Whatever holes we might have in our souls; they are not about keeping up with the Joneses or building the Grandest Staircase of them all.

We suspect that our freedom is that of the vagabond, the wanderer, with a touch of the introvert. We've never been so much for a having a house or a home in any normal sense of the word.

We like the luxury of rootlessness, and enjoy the feeling of slight alienation that travels bring; being that citizen who is at home everywhere and nowhere.

Do we always want to flee the arena? No, probably not. Our appetite of vagabondism will probably change over the year and over time. So sometimes we will revert to a kind of epicurean hippie-freedom, and certainly also try to act with the world around us, and then be ready to leave for our next journey.

So that mean that we will probably not aim for the minimal stash when trying to seize up our portfolio. 

But even as one travels the world, one will discover, as the philosopher puts it, that one can really never truly escape oneself. Because one always has oneself in the saddle.

So where is the true limits of financial freedom?

As Seneca had it: What does it matter how much a man has laid up in his safe, or in his warehouse, how large are his flocks and how fat his dividends, if he covets his neighbour's property, and reckons, not his past gains, but his hopes of gains to come? Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough. 

Farewell.

The 20% Barbell: A better price for risk

This is a hypothetical take, and an eye-opener perhaps; a starter to begin to ruminate on: the price of risk. 

Before venturing into the idea of a stock market barbell, we should say that this is an idea we have not chosen for ourselves. But we all love to get a good price, right? So it's still interesting to consider how one can think around getting a good price for risk.

A high price of risk 

One aspect with any portfolio is to look at the price of the risk in the portfolio. Is the price we pay for the risk, well, ... fair? And what could one even mean with that? 

As we all know, stock market downturns can be long, and severe, and as usual worse than all we've seen so far, and certainly deeper than data from the last 50 years shows. We think they can be more nerve-wrecking than more hardcore investors might give the appearance of.

And what do we get for that stock-market-risk? Well, the average return for the total stock market was 8.3% (excluding inflation) for the last 50 years in the US.

Even more interesting to consider is perhaps the safe withdrawal rate. For many of us, that's the penultimate goal we are after. The safe withdrawal rate for the US stock market, dividends and all, was 4.3% for the same last 50 years, which is the foundation for the famous 4%-rule.

What do we need to pay to get that return and withdrawal rate? 

Part of what needs to be paid for the average stock market return certainly relates to 10-11 year periods of nail-biting until the numbers get back into black.

For some, the story ends there. But perhaps, as often when haggling about a good price, that shouldn't be the end of the story. 

Not the end of the story

Creating a barbell

How can one get a better price for risk, without going into obscure financial wizardry?

One thing to do is to construct some kind of barbell. 

What is a financial barbell? It's about instead of going for the average, somehow balance extremes instead.

And example: one part of a portfolio can be something quite vanilla like a total stock market fund. Then we add something that is also quite risky, something perhaps as explosive as stocks, or even more explosive, but for radically different reasons - so to speak on the other side of the bar. 

This is not quite the same as regular 'diversification', but something more fundamental, another beast all together out on the other side of the barbell. 

One actually wants the barbell to be a dangerous thing, that is very sure to swing heavily in another direction as the market moves.

So it's not per se about reducing risk, but spreading it out to the opposite extremes, using it to one's advantage, and make sure it behaves differently from one's other assets.

There are very elegant ways of constructing a barbell, but let's be frank, they are not quite accessible to us more average investors. 

But just because some of the more elegant ways are only available to advanced investors, or the very wealthy, that doesn't mean that there is absolutely no way to get a better price for risk for the rest of us.

Gymnasium in Pompeii (79 AD). Place where barbells might have been in use. 

So let's construct our barbell.

We use the US stock market for illustration, but the same is true in most parts of the developed world.

First, we need a barbell that is heavy enough and volatile enough to actually matter at the other side of the stock market. Of course both size and volatility matters. In this example, we are satisfied with a 20% size of our portfolio for the other end of the barbell. 

But as said in the beginning, this is hypothetical. If you check the links below, you can see that what we actually did ourselves was not to have an asymmetrical barbell, but a very symmetrical approach, and we went for four different weights - two barbells - instead of two weights - one barbell, as the example here. 

Going less than 20% of the portfolio value in the barbell-asset? Then one must beware, so one is not falling for the siren's call of average return and upside potential, and the protection becomes so small that it's just illusionary.

By mixing in 20% of another asset class that is (also) volatile but under other risk conditions than the stock market, one reduces the volatility of the all stock market portfolio so much that, well, these strategies become quite powerful. 

We suggest considering gold as barbell. It's conservative, has been around in finance for a few thousand years, and is easily accessible in physically-backed ETF:s. Something else might work, as long as it's volatile enough, moves fundamentally differently from stocks, and can be supposed to still be accessible when the knifes are falling.

The barbell strategy of course also assumes that we keep that 80% 20% ratio over time, for instance with yearly re-balancing.

What happens then?

The 80/20 portfolio, surprisingly, just gives a tiny drop in the average return compared to the stock market index. It's as small as 0.4% difference for the US example, almost just a day of trading.

But, and here comes the much better price on risk, there's quite some things that we gain for those tiny 0.4% we pay with.

Suddenly, the safe withdrawal rate over the last 50 years increases to 5% (a very tangible increase, 7 k€ more to spend from a 1000 k€ portfolio, each and every year, adjusted for inflation, until death does us apart). 

Large volatility is dangerous for the safe withdrawal rate. Hence one gets a much better rate if one manages to keep the volatility lower, and especially mitigate the extremes. 

The time to recover from a downturn also shrinks much, and becomes a much more liveable five-six years, and the deepest loss is around 30% instead of a nerve-wracking 50%. 

Let's say that years to recover is what we "feel" that we pay for average return, and let's put the results  in a table:

	Getting	Paying	Price
	Average Return	Years to recover	Years to recover/ average return
100% Total Stock Market	8,3	10	1,2
20% Barbell	7,9	6	0,8

So what we want is the return, and what do we pay? A reasonable way to think about what we pay for the return, is the number of years until our portfolio is back on track. 

The usual definition of price is what we pay divided with what we get.

So, looking at the table, the price for the risk seems to be 50% better with our barbell.

This is an illustration of what one can feel in one's gut. There's something strange, perhaps even unfair, with the price one pays for the risk in the total stock market.

There's a better price to pay, with higher safety.

One might even dare to say that only a fool would go for a sub-optimal price on risk. 

A court fool.  But even the Romans had buffoons to entertain their dinners.

//antinous&lucilius

Where to go from here?

- We didn't go for only two assets in our barbell for our accumulation journey. We went for even higher security instead, with a double-barbell, with four assets.

- Read more about our thinking here: A well-kept secret and Our Crawling Road.

NB.

Oh, we hear protests of our presentation of risk. There are many ways to look at that. So just to be more complete, let's expand the table and add a more commonly accepted statistical measure of risk, even if we think that it's too narrow.

But if it makes a sceptical reader more intrigued, the better. 

The best yet is to think and investigate oneself.

	Getting		Paying		Price
	Average Return	Safe Withdrawal Rate	Longest Drawdown	Volatility	Drawdown/ Return	Volatility/ Return
100% Total Stock Market	8,3	4,3	10	17,3	1,2	4,0
20% Barbell	7,9	5,0	6	13,5	0,8	2,7

The Fable of the Monkey and the Trap

I'm pretty sure that this fable is a modern myth, dressed up in scientism.

Yet, like the fables of the old, it's a good one. Especially for everyone like us - lovers of freedom. What the modern version lacks in narrative, it compensates with simplicity.

The story goes, as we all know, that we can feed monkeys sweet, irresistible cookies. Or banana, I suppose, but there is something more illustrative and diabolical with an artificial cookie, so we’ll go with that. If we give the monkeys a few cookies, they learn to crave it. Then we can construct a simple trap. 

If it had been a fable of the old, it would have had a little bit more soul to it, and would have gone something like this.

It all starts with our young monkey in the jungle, who one day fell out of his tree, and found himself in a glade that he had never seen before. 

In that glade, the sunlight shone through the canopy on the strangest and most beautiful, yet outlandish thing the monkey had ever seen; a beautiful, colourful cookie, covered with the sweetest of frosting.

The little monkey went close, and sniffed the cookie. 

The cookie smelled like all the fruits the monkey had eaten  and could think of in the jungle, taken all together. The smell had something intense to it, as if this cookie could promise everything good with his little monkey-life; distant happy memories, present delights and future promises, the berrys and the ripe fruits, the honey of the honey-bees; yes, even love and recognition from his monkey-friends.

Sparks of joy shot up in his little monkey-brain as he tasted the cookie, and tears of bliss slowly rolled down his little monkey cheeks. 

Then the monkey saw yet another cookie, a little further away. 

Even before eating the new cookie, our monkey saw a small opening in the trunk of a jungle tree. 

The inside of the trunk was full of shimmering cookies. The monkey ran to the tree, and luckily enough, the opening was just big enough so he could squeeze in his little monkey-hand. 

The little monkey closed his little hand around one of the cookies. 

The little monkey tried to get his hand out of the trunk. Strangely, it was impossible. It was as if however hard he tried, he couldn’t break free. There was just not space enough. It was truly impossible. His hand didn't fit through the opening anymore.

The little monkey started to try to figure out what to do about that, but he could not come up with a solution. 

Perhaps it was time to get one of his little monkey-depressions, as sometimes happened when he didn’t get what he wanted. Or perhaps a tantrum and complaints? 

Then he heard a sound in the thicket. Was there someone who would take advantage from that he was stuck in this unfair prison? Was it perhaps even dangerous?

Déjeuner de jambon, Nicolas Lancret 1735

However heart-gripping the story of our monkey is, there are indeed cookies to let go off for most of us. Letting go of the bigger house, yet another car, letting go of the summer house, that vacation escape, realize that the children will be fine without prestigious schools, and the pool and yacht will not add to our happiness, in a neverending chase as real life passes us by.

When the hunters come, in the shape of worse times, a career that doesn't work anymore, lay-offs, skills that have less value, a boss we cannot stand, or a feeling that it's all unfulfilling. Then, instead of letting go of the candy, we opt for 'burn-out', crises, depression, bitterness and we convince ourselves that we are victims.

It’s hard, and harder the more used to the cookies we’ve become, to drive in that wedge that is necessary to free ourselves from our own tree-trunk that keeps us trapped. 

Yet, unclenching the fist and obtaining freedom of time is a shift of perspective that it’s as surprising as it would be for our monkey if he opened his hand. Suddenly what seemed a radical 50-70% savings become a reality. And we can escape the prison and achieve rapid financial independence and freedom.

All we need to do to obtain our freedom is to let go of the cookies.

Balancing The New Year's Resolutions - Part 2/2

This is part 2 of 2 about our overly ambitious way of making New Year's Resolutions for 2021. 

We've divided our resolutions in 4 areas with Epic Mission Statements and all! 

• Job: Leaving Earth's Gravity
• Fun: Enjoying the Ride
• Body: Building our Temples
• Soul: Expanding our Stories

How we think about focusing on the journey and how we set the mission in Part 1. Here comes our resolutions on the last two areas - Body & Soul.

Body: Building our Temples

Keeping the ambitions realistic

As said in the beginning, we are very keen on training and fitness, both of us. 

In the last two years we've improved a lot in our fitness (increasing muscle-mass while staying lan, hitting records on our running). But still - let's make it a focus. 

We've just put in a time goal, of 9000 minutes of deliberate training. And topped it up with at least 3 times 2 mile crawls. We like swimming. Running comes natural. 

If we keep that up, we probably can pull of the odd 42 km run as well. 

Soul: Expanding our Stories

So the last area. Perhaps the most nebulous one, but on equal terms with the rest. What stories do we tell ourselves about ourselves? And, more importantly, what stories do we tell ourselves that we are NOT? 

A question worthy of exploration.

So in the search for expanding our stories, we put things like:

- get a lifestyle / work-life coach

- take the fearless and tougher choice 2 times

- at two social events, having a (tasteful) focus that is 180 degrees contrary to our main personality traits 

- identify three stories we tell ourselves that diminishes us

- improve 1 language

As many non-English speakers do, we already speak a bunch of languages, but why stop there? To a certain extent, as Goethe puts it, those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own. And perhaps less about the world as well. If we think of where we will land, our story will probably include a touch of Socrates cosmopolitan - he who is at home everywhere and nowhere.

Antinous German is not quite were it should be, so he should basically be able to have a conversation in the end of the year. He will aim for reading four books and listening to four audiobooks. Lucilius Mandarin is rusty, so he will focus on building vocabulary and basic sentences, and should be able to survive everyday situations in Mandarin at the end of the year.

A word about that thing about going counter to our personality traits. It sounds strange. It should sounds strange! 

Two Examples: 

• For Lucilius, who naturally is very goal and result-focused, this means going to a social event, outside of work, with the sole purpose of being really nice to everyone. No other results needed, no learning telling mingling with ulterior motives. 
• For Antinous, who naturally is a very likeable person, it will mean putting his own will in the centre of a social event and make something happen that just depend on that he wants it. So it's "Expanding our stories" that have snuck into this category a little bit as well. 

What about that tougher choice? It's about at least twice taking a choice where we first feel like "nah, this is nothing for me" and say "yes, I'll do it!". It's probably related to worklife, but not necessary. The idea is to push us to expand our story of who we tell ourselves that we are. 

We will also try to get a coach this year. We've found a way to finance that, so it's not as expensive as it sounds. We will try to use the coach to identify a few stories that we tell ourselves that diminishes who we are. And just being open to getting new perspectives and ideas.

Let's see how this works out for us, but we hope this way 2021 will become more intentional for us. 

What are your missions and how do you go about to reach them?

Balancing the New Year's Resolutions - Part 1/2

We occasionally run marathons. It's not like we aim for it, but for us it's a proof that we stay reasonably fit. 

How do we pull this off? By loving the process, as the saying goes. Those 42 km:s become the outcome of early morning runs, good food, blissful swims and long, long runs in the woods.

Not a forest per se, but still very good for running

So how does this relate to New Year's Resolutions? 

It's about avoiding wishful thinking. Don't fall in the b*llshit trap of magically wishing for a goal (run a marathon). Wish for the journey!  

A good resolution moves us in a desired direction. Who exactly cares where we might end up, as long as it's in that direction? Super-fit but didn't run a marathon, would that really be a problem?

For a few years now we didn't have any New Year's Resolutions. 

We have been coasting along on our journey towards financial independence, and we didn't feel the need to think about where we were heading. That overarching goal blinded out all else. But this year, it feels like the coasting part has changed. 

Our lives will need to transform again, and start to prepare us for landing at some sweet spot outside  gravity's pull of the paycheck. 

Our New Year's Resolutions 

So how can we avoid losing sight of the horizon? After some thinking and some more running in the woods (snow included) we decided to split our resolutions up in four areas.  

And what the heck. Epic mission statements can't be wrong. Here they go:

• Job: Leaving Earth's Gravity.
• Fun: Enjoying the Ride
• Body: Building our Temples
• Soul: Expanding our Stories

Job: Leaving Earth's Gravity

In the job category, we put things like:

- Work more than 4+, 3 Sundays 

- Work more than 12h+ days, 8 times 

- Establish Total Budget Control, for each of the 12 months 

We try to stick to the motto that our jobs must feel worthwhile. Lo and behold, we are at work places were we think humanity is one nano-iota better off if we show up at work. When we haven't believed in work - then we've done all we could to wiggle ourselves out of that situation.

And with probably a much, much shorter work life than the average Joe - we don't have to get disillusioned to put in hard work every now and then. It's more amusing to go all in. So instead of seeing that as a sacrifice - we turn it around and make hard work a promise. 

We shall stand up and fight (when necessary!). Much more fun.

And on another note, related to that paycheck. We've never really had complete budget control. We have just stayed very frugal, and summed things up roughly at year's end. Usually we hit our budget.  

The thinking here is that if we better know where the money goes, it will actually allow us to spend more. We should feel allowed to actually spend what we've set off as our fun budget.

Which opens up for the next topic; the Fun Area.

Fun: Enjoying the Ride

One danger with the quest for financial independence, or rather financial freedom, is that we tend to become so goal oriented that we just forget having fun. We forget everything that doesn't have an obvious payoff. Like piano. We are never going to play the piano at Carnegie Hall, let's put it like that, but it's still fun to play!

So this year we decided to have a spotlight on Fun as well. 

In this area we put:

- 1 long-haul flight for fun only

- making the socially adventurous/interesting choice, 3 times

- able to play two songs well on the piano

- put in the time necessary for at least three close friends

I think the list speaks for itself. 

Why all the social stuff? We score somewhere on the middle between introvert and extrovert, hence some focus at the social side, as we know we enjoy it but need a push to take initiative. It's also an area that was somewhat sacrificed under our financial bandwagon during the last few years. So it's about coming back to something we used to have. I suspect we share that with many in this community. 

Related to that we also put an explicit focus on our close friends. It's tragic, but we admit that we tended to play down the time for friends while aiming stubbornly for financial independence. That is probably nothing that will serve us well in a financially free future.

Let's save the two last areas, Body and Soul for Part 2.

How are you going with your resolutions so far?

Time for change: The Pathfinder Portfolio

 How permanent is a Permanent Portfolio?

Antinous contemplating change 

Stick to the strategy. That is a good motto. Meddling with a portfolio is a dangerous thing. More than anything, meddling means that we are likely to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Perhaps we are about to do something that we will regret. But hey! stock prices are back on 2016 levels. 

And two more observations for us:

1) Cash. We have the advantage of having quite a lot of cash, as we have been sitting on a conservative permanent portfolio (which we thought was the best strategy for our accumulation phase, up until now) 

2) Stable. This dip has also shown us that we are more emotionally more stable than we perhaps thought. We observed the stock market plunge with a detached curiosity, and not the panic and white nights we feared.

Conclusions: We think we can somewhat increase the risk in our portfolio. But we still want a good price on the risk we take on.  

Enter The Pathfinder Portfolio
We had, as early as back in 2018, started to think of possible portfolios that would increase risk and return in a very, for us, bullet-proof manner. 

The basic idea is to change our portfolio allocation to this:

• 50% stock allocation 
• (details: 16% US Large Cap, 16% Domestic Large Cap Value, 17% Domestic Small Cap) 
• 25% long-term bonds 
• (details: 8% US Long Term 25y+, 17% Euro Long Term 25y+)
• 25% Gold 
• (details: in different Gold ETF:s)

Try this allocation out in your preferred financial alchemy lab yourself, and marvel at the properties. 

After our own trillion different simulations, our conclusion is that this allocation keep some of the most attractive characteristics of the permanent portfolio.

Some niceties
The average return with this portfolio can be expected to be up roughly 2% up from the permanent portfolio, so close to 10% in nominal terms. 

We're at a point where we've reached basic levels of financial independence, or Low Earth Orbite as we call it, and this return is a very good deal for the risk with the bleak and bad scenarios here.

Especially when opportunity presents itself.

Since 1970, the max drawdown time was around 5 years. This would be an acceptable drawdown time for us. It would mean that our accumulation phase would take around 1 year longer than we planned to reach the financial orbit we are aiming for, compared to the average scenario. For us today, this would be nothing we couldn't live with. 

Risk (volatility) is a nasty thing, and we rather use it to our advantage than fear it. 

It was around this point in our investigations that Antinous baptized our new portfolio the Pathfinder Portfolio, in an attempt to put a name on how this portfolio can help us finding our way to our version of freedom.

An often forgotten property
Another good property of our new portfolio is that it has a very attractive perpetual withdrawal rate (around 6%), due to it's reasonable volatility, and - like the permanent portfolio - ability to survive setbacks and - with another property it lends from the stock market - recover quickly. 

Together with the start date sensitivity which is pretty low, we think this is a kind of portfolio that we can stick with for a long time. The still low start date sensitivity means that we will not have to sit and try to time the allocation weights or worry if we need to take some money of the table when the financial climate seems good or bad. 

We also don't have to think about balancing out of the portfolio or "decrease risk" as we get older or leave the 9-5 life, as the withdrawal rate is already super-duper-attractive.

So, like the permanent portfolio, this portfolio has the sweet, sweet property of being, well, permanent.

Cue good sleep. 

Why not go all in on the stock market?
The total stock market - dividends included - can have drawdown times of more than 10 years. For us, that would seriously thwart our accumulation phase. 

So we rather "pay" with missed opportunity to keep us more safe from the darker periods of the stock market.

The perpetual withdrawal rate of the total stock market is also 4.5% for the same 50 year period. That is actually 1.5 percentage units LOWER than our Pathfinder portfolio. Yet another testament to the dangers of volatility. 1.5% difference is significant.  It would have a very real impact on our future budget, in the range of 1000€ a month.

Let's see how this portfolio works out and if and how we do the transition.

Take care,

//antinous&lucilius

Where to go from here?

• Read our thoughts on why to go with permanent-portfolio-type strategy here: A well-kept secret: A Portfolio for Accumulation (part 1/2)
• How did our portfolio do during the plunge in 2020? Our Portfolio During Tumultuous Times. 

NB. I hope we'll get to dive into an in-depth article on the ideas and reasoning behind this portfolio, and what we think around the concept of a fair price of risk.

Our Portfolio During Tumultuous Times

How did our portfolio fare during the corona crisis?

Sometimes one has to wrestle with the unexpected

The first question is of course to ask what kind of vessel we sit in. We were sitting in a very stable one, in the shape of our permanent portfolio. 

How did it go in February-March 2020?

Like everyone we've been though some interesting weeks.

We suspected that corporate short term bonds could get into trouble, as have happened repeatedly before when cash and risk appetite dries up. We didn't have to much cash in corporate bonds, but this time we were lucky and managed to sell them off quickly.

Lesson Learned 1: Only cash is cash. And when the knives are falling, cash is indeed king.

Another thing we noted was that we didn't get nervous at all. Either we are just very nivilated. Or we trust all the tons and tons of simulations we've done on the permanent portfolio that we have. 

When the dust started to settle, we were down with 11% from the peak. So basically well within the bounds that we expected - bearing in mind that our simulations were on year basis, and this was intra-year.

Lessons Learned 2: We might be more risk tolerant than expected.

What were your thoughts during the worst drop in almost a hundred years?