Transcript

Good morning everybody, and thank you for joining us at this morning’s webinar. My name is Enda Brady, I’m a Certified Financial Planner and one of the owners, with my brother Coman, of iQ Financial You’re all very welcome. Today’s webinar is for business owners, and it’s titled, Here’s what you need to know to make better investment decisions for stronger, more reliable returns in volatile markets. And we’re delighted to be hosting the event today with Eric Geffroy from Dimensional Fund Advisors. To date, based on our experience, there are four areas that business owners seek our advice on regularly. 

• One is how to be tax efficient. 
• Another is advice on how to provide for their family, 
• having a plan for retirement, including how they might exit their business is another and finally, 
• the fourth topic that we’ll cover this morning that comes up most for us are questions from business owners on how to invest their money wisely. 

It’s a really important area. We’re going to try to add as much value as possible with this webinar and share information we’ve learned over the last 20 years in business. At the start, some housekeeping to make sure we make the most of the next 30 minutes or so, I’ll pass you over to Maria Devine, our Senior Financial Planning Administrator and Office Manager here at iQ Financial

Hello. My job today is to keep things running smoothly, and I’ll also be keeping an eye on any questions you may ask. The way you can get involved is by clicking the Q and A button on your screen where you can type your questions. We’ll answer the questions at the end. We want everyone to have them answered before you leave. I will also put in the chat a couple of links to our iQ Financial website, where you can access our guides, including a Business Owners Guide To Successful Investing, and where you can also book a Learn More Call or sign up to our newsletter for business owners. After the webinar, we will send you a follow up email with a recording of this session, the slides and the links to our guides for business owners. So if you miss anything the first time around, you can catch up later. Now I will hand back to Enda to get started.

This is our agenda today, folks. We’ll briefly introduce iQ Financial and Dimensional, and before the end, we’ll share our investment philosophy and show you a way to approach the whole area of investing. But the bulk and most important part of the webinar this morning is that we’re going to talk about the five big investment questions that we’ve seen so far in 2025 and get the insights from Eric from Dimensional. We’re conscious that there are some attendees that may not know about iQ Financial or Dimensional, and what both firms provide. 

At iQ Financial, we provide a Financial Planning and Investment Management Service to business owners. We help owners make the most of their money. We advise business owners over 45 who want to sell, retire or make work optional in five to 10 years, www.iqf.ie is the best place to learn more about us, and we’ll share more ways to get in touch before the end. We only work with investment managers we trust and Dimensional Fund Advisors is one of just two we’ve chosen. Dimensional are different. Their approach is grounded in academic research, including work by their founders that earned Nobel Prizes. They have identified proven investment ideas, like how small businesses, more profitable businesses, and businesses whose underlying value adds up to more than their current value, all can help drive higher returns. Crucially, they’ve built cost effective investments that give investors a chance to eke out returns above the average equity market and over time, that compounds to a meaningful difference. They have over 40 years’ experience and a global presence, and we trust them with our Clients’ money. Maria will now introduce you to Eric.

Eric Geffroy is a London based Investment Director and Vice President in Dimensional Investment Solutions Group (ISG), having joined the firm in 2016, focuses on the Europe, Middle East and Asia regions. Eric coordinates various ISG activities with an emphasis on Product Management. He also plays a key role in the development of internal and external communications related to investment philosophy, the portfolio management process, and portfolio commentary. In addition, he helps drive collaboration between the Investment Teams and Client Focus Teams. Before joining Dimensional, Eric was responsible for Exchange Traded Fund product management at Invesco Powershares in Paris, and later served as an ETF specialist at State Street Global Advisors. Eric earned an MBA with concentrations in finance, economics and entrepreneurship from the University of Chicago Booth, School of Business and a BBA with a concentration in finance from the INSEEC Group in Paris.

First a quick definition before we get into it with Eric to set the scene. This is our definition of what investing is. Investing is the practice of putting your resources, typically your money, to work in different asset classes, with the goal of growing the value of that money over time. It involves, hopefully, a deliberate choice to put your money to work in assets like equities, which is investing in publicly listed businesses, bonds, where you lend your money to governments or businesses in exchange for a return, or bricks and mortar property, with the aim of increasing the value of investing and / or generating a rental income from that investment. Eric, it’s a pleasure to have you on the webinar this morning. Thank you for giving of your time. How you doing? 

Yeah, pretty good. Thanks for having me. 

No problem. Let’s get straight into it. Eric, with the five topics we’ve talked about in advance of this webinar, we have what we believe are the big investment questions so far in 2025 so we can’t talk obviously, without mentioning our friends in the United States. 

Question 1. 

Firstly, given the 2025 US tariff announcements and the volatility they have created. Is this year’s market volatility unusual? And what should we expect ahead?

Yeah, so it’s not really unusual when you look at the full history of equity investing, but maybe we can just step back and just look at some numbers year to date. So year to date, equity markets in local currency actually positive. So if you are looking at the S&P500 in the US, for example, it’s now back in positive territory. Things at BMS GA Europe actually up quite a lot, plus 10% and so forth. So look locally, markets have done well. Now the big story, of course, if you are tuning in here, and you are a globally diversified investor, then you will own shares from other countries, including the US, and you will have currency exposure that has been one of the big stories this year, the depreciation of the US Dollar versus other currencies, which means that year to date, you are still but minus 4% if you are globally diversified investor now, what we like to look at as well, besides these, you know these numbers, is to look at something called the VIX. The VIX is an indicator of anticipated volatility in markets. It’s very useful just to get a sense of sentiment. Earlier this year, it shot up to a level of 45 which is a level we had not seen since COVID, but it’s now back at much more moderate levels. So this is just looking at market data. A question, and that we do get quite a lot, is how common is that type of how to say tremor in market. So between, things are looking much better now than they did a month ago, but still, between February and April, we had a loss of about 12% so that’s called a drawdown, and that’s a pretty that feels like a pretty substantial one. The question is, is it actually a substantial drawdown? So at Dimensional what we always like to do is to be systematic in how we approach these questions. So we went back all the way to the year 1927 so we have nearly 100 years of data. And the question we ask is, in how many of these calendar years have you had, at some point in the year a loss of 10% or more. Do you want to take a guess Enda?

Every year.

It’s close to two thirds of the times, and then you need 60% of the time you have a loss at some point in the year of 10% or more. Now, if you were to look at, okay, how come only is a 20% loss at some point in the year. That’s 1/3 of the time. So one year, every three years, you will have a pretty hard conversation with your partner or financial advisor, whether it might be so again, volatility is part of the journey. And just a parting thought on this idea of drawdowns is it can be helpful to compare the drawdowns we just went through, so about 12% with some of the previous drawdowns. So COVID was about 21%, the global financial crisis was 45% just to give you an order of magnitude. And as we talked before, I’m looking here at only the bad news piece, the risk and drawdown story. Of course, there is a reason why we take equity risk. And Maria, if you can pull the first slide I have, yeah, the reason is that, as an equity investor, over the very long term, you have been rewarded for Tech. On that risk, right? So here we’re looking at decades of data, and you can see, in general, it just trends north. Now, many of the events that we are showing on that slide here might look now with the benefit of hindsight that it was not all that bad, but I really remember, for example, here in the Dimensional London office, when 2020 the COVID happened. Pretty hard conversations. It was again, things we had never seen before. And yeah, so many, many of these shocks that we see here on that slide really looked horrendous at the time. Things did turn out all right in the in the end for investors, and we don’t see any reason why today should be different. 

Question 2.

Eric, if you’re a business owner who’s seen his or her investment or pension value move down, I know you have touched on this. Should you, depending on what stage in your investment journey you’re at, should you change the way your money is invested or try to time things to potentially avoid some losses that might happen just now?

So we think that’s asset allocation, so how much to allocate to equities, is a conversation you should have with your financial advisor. However, if it’s about market timing, then we do have a pretty strong, view at Dimensional about that. We’ve looked at the data, and we think it’s just really hard to do, if you think about it, when you try to do market timing, if you see markets go down, or if you think markets might go down and you take your money out, park it in cash, well, you need to get not one thing right, but three things right. 

First of all, your call needs to be correct. You must be right that it was you needed to take the money out and not put more back in the market, right. So the broad direction needs to be right. Then the start of your trade needs to happen at the right time. If you missed the entry, it can kill your whole idea. And of course, when you unwind your trade, it also needs to be right. It’s three, three things you need to get right. And how hard it is cannot be understated. 

I’ll give you an example we looked at. This is an anecdote, so I’m not being systematic here. I’m just cherry picking an anecdote. So I don’t know if some people on the line have heard of the expression irrational exuberance, it’s something that Alan Greenspan talked about in 1996. Now imagine you’re a US investor, and the year is 1996 you’ve been sitting on just fabulous returns for the past 15 years. If you had invested $1 in 1980 that’s now $13 in 1996 but now you hear the Fed chairman, so not any random commentator, like the Fed Chairman talk about the risk of assets being too expensive, and you say, Okay, I’ll take my money out. And guess what? You’re correct, because a couple of years later, there is the dot com crash, but because you’re very lucky or very smart, you managed to buy back to get back into the market right at the bottom. So that sounds to me like a fantastic journey. Now, guess how that investor would have done compared to someone who just forgot, literally forgot, their password, would have done worse. Because here the problem is that that investor left the market too early, right in 1996 so missed out on a couple of years of returns. So if you look at the growth of wealth charts, that investor is about like 20% worse off than someone who just stayed invested and didn’t do anything. 

I’ve got a slide that looks at this a little more systematically, and that’s the one that Maria is showing here. So ignore my anecdotes about missing out some of the good years leading to the dot com crash. Now the question is, if you had invested your money here, this example is with the US market, but it’s the same story applies everywhere. So let’s say you invest $1,000 in the market in the year 2000, 25 years later, that is now worth it’s the first figures on the left here, $6.6 thousand right? That’s just you did nothing. Just stay invested. Now, what’s happened to your returns? If you had missed just one week, the best week of returns, it’s now $5.5 thousand  So quite a substantial loss compared to just staying invested and you know where I’m going with this. If you missed the best month, the best three months, your experience gets significantly detracted. 

Now, sometimes people ask us, okay, what if you miss the worst days? Well, you know, experience shows that is not a behavior that happens very often, what you’re seeing on the screen is something that’s much more common. People’s patience get tested after a big drop in markets. They get out of the market and miss on some good returns. So I think this is a pretty powerful cautionary tale, about missing some of these good returns. 

And the final bits I have on market timing is we absolutely would do market timing at Dimensional if we knew of a reliable way of doing it right. And we’ve looked really hard. We’ve built more than 700 different strategies aiming at timing the markets. We looked at things like how expensive markets are relative to their recent history, relative to their full history, with the different measures and so forth. And the bottom line is just pure noise. So out of the 700 strategies we tested, a few of them did return positive returns, but it was pure luck. Just as if you ask enough people to roll a dice, you know 10 times in a row, someone will manage to roll 10 sixes.

Question 3. 

Very good. Thank you, Eric, just expanding on that a bit, and I know we’ve discussed this, Eric, is new investment opportunities that come along. Property, bricks and mortar, is a huge one that constantly comes up for Irish investors, or different new investments. So, just expanding on the downside risk of making new investment decisions, potentially moving to a new type of investment now. But what are the other downsides to making a new investment decision? 

I think in general, what’s goes into your portfolio should depend on your financial planning and goals. If you have a long horizon, then you can likely take equity risk. If not, you can take less equity risk. Now if you think of putting in some more exotic things, like cryptocurrency and so forth, we don’t do that at Dimensional, but we think a good framework you could employ is what’s the size of that asset class in the complete like total market. So if you were to look at what’s the complete size of Bitcoin, for example, in the total market, compared to equities, compared to fixed income, all of that, it’s a tiny portion. So we do not invest in these set of assets at Dimensional, but we think it’s a useful starting point. Okay, how big is the opportunity set to start with? 

And I guess we can dig a little more into cash, right? Yeah. So, granted, it’s not an asset class, right, but it’s something that we also see people asking, should I put more money into cash and or should I give up on equities again, to maybe invest in some of these other asset class we just talked about, whatever it might be. And here, I think an important lesson is, after markets have gone down, usually things tend to get just back on track. 

We have this slide Maria, if you can just show it. Here we are asking the question, what has happened to market returns historically after a downfall. So the first one here is, if you look at the very first column here, we’re asking the question, what has been the historical one-year average return following a 10% market decline. And you can see historically, the one-year average return has been 11.8% after a 10% decline on three years, it was a cumulative 34% on five years, cumulative 68%. What about a 20% market decline? 30% market decline? Again, you see these positive numbers here. But my point is maybe looking at some other asset classes might be tempting when you’ve been challenged as an equity investor, but there is just zero evidence in our view, and we looked hard, that you should do anything about it. It’s part of the journey, stay invested. It’s called the equity risk premium, for a reason, and over the long term, usually it has served investors. 

I know we’re flogging this point to death a little bit, Eric, but we have got questions from some clients so far this year about whether they should move to cash, whether they should time it, whether they should look at a new investment opportunity. In summary, from what you’re saying, there’s no reliable way to actually do that. And you’re maximizing your chances of staying the course more often than not, if you have a long-term plan and you’re in equities in the first place. Is that the right summary of them, couple of slides? 

Absolutely, just staying with the journey is better. The plan should be determined with your financial advisor and the volatility, your tolerance to volatility should be determined with your advisor. Maybe you learn something with you know, with a period of high volatility, maybe you learn that your budget, your tolerance may be lower or higher than you imagined, right? But again, we urge people just to think about their financial plans altogether, rather than doing some market timing.

Good just I’m conscious we’re just at about 20 past. Just for everybody on the webinar, Maria has a reminder for you:

So just to let you know that questions and comments that you write in the Q and A are not visible to everyone. Only the presenters and myself can see them, so we’ll read them out at the end. Comments in the chat are visible for everyone to see. If you want to talk about any of the topics in more detail, send us a message in the Q and A and I can set up a meeting for you, or you can click the link that I put in the chat for our website to book a Learn More Call. Okay, now I’m going to hand back to Eric and Enda.

Question 4. 

Eric, the part of the market that we serve and the common denominator on the clients that we serve is if it’s a couple, one of the couple is self-employed or a director of a limited company, so they’re business-owner households, and they’ve done well in their business. They’ve grown their turnover. They have good experience. They tend to be over the age of 45 and regularly they have strong opinions. So we have people’s opinions about what might happen, and they can be for good reasons. So whether they’re professional forecasters, or whether they’re business owners with strong opinions on what might happen in the future. As investors how can they calibrate their expectations around the many forecasts you know that are out there and the noise that they hear about what’s going to happen, many of them negative. You know about company valuations, or what’s going to happen with it, with tariffs that might affect their future investment values and prompt them to try to do something. How should they deal with the forecasts that they hear?

Our view, it’s not just our view, is that prices, market prices, are forward-looking. They reflect the expectations of everyone in the marketplace. So every day you have trillions being traded. This reflects the view of everyone, optimists, pessimists. Everyone’s view is in there. So it’s unlikely that anyone in particular, in our view, would have an edge over the collective wisdom of markets. That’s really our core philosophy at Dimensional but now, just like you and someone, sometimes some French relative will forward me an article, maybe something from the Financial Times, or something like this about a forecaster who makes a bold prediction for markets. And here, first of all, I tell them exactly what I just told you. My best forecast instrument is the current price. It’s the best I think I can do. But then, okay, let’s look at the forecasters. And the first question would be to ask, what’s their track record? Because, you know, making interesting quotes and interesting articles is one thing, but delivering good results is another one. 

So Maria, can we just pull up the slide I have here? So here we looked at the predictions that professional forecasters made for the year 2024 and we didn’t cherry pick. We looked at the full panel of forecasters in the Bloomberg survey, right? So what you can see is that, on average, they predicted pretty lukewarm or even negative returns for 2024 right? You can see the one at the bottom, for example, predicted minus 13% or so, but the average was around 1%. Now, what was the historical average for us? Equities, 12% what the markets do in 2024 23%, so all these professionals, which are very credible, experienced people with very robust teams and tools, didn’t get anywhere near the actual results of markets. Again, it’s back to our idea markets are competitive. It’s unlikely that anyone in particular holds an edge over all the information that gets into prices. Now you could ask, you could tell me, right? Eric, fine. 2024 was a pretty bad year for them. But did you cherry pick that? No, I didn’t. 

Maria, can you move to the next one, please? So here we looked at basically the same data. We look at the full range of predictions of this panel of forecasters per calendar year. Here, and what the yellow dot here is the actual S&P500 return. And you can see the other points here reflect the lowest prediction, the highest prediction, and then the median prediction. And in every single of the past five calendar years, they were off the mark. So again, I’m sure some of these predictions were really convincing when you read about them. But again, this is not to disparage anyone in particular. It’s just to say that markets are competitive. It’s just really hard to do better than markets. And the final thing on this bit is that many forecasters will also change their forecast pretty quickly. So of the forecast on the previous slide, several of them were updated within six months. So where the opinion actually completely changed within six months. So if you start paying attention to any, any professional forecast in particular, then you had the mercy of having to rebalance your portfolio based on, you know, on whatever they will come up with.

Question 5.

Very good, Eric, so the final one of the five areas that we wanted to cover. So let’s say you’re not going to be led by short term events. You’re not going to react emotionally. So what can you do instead, for those tuning in this morning who want to maybe review their investments and pensions to check if they’re well positioned for the long term, what’s actually within your control to help you get the most reliable returns, or at least best position yourself to get returns going forward.

Yeah, thanks. And I think it’s a great framework. So far, we’ve talked largely about stuff you can’t control, but now, what can you actually control? And in our view, you should try to work with an asset manager or an advisor who does everything they can to increase return, even the small things that might not look significant, but you don’t want to leave anything on the table, and that does everything they can to reduce cost. 

And Maria, can you pull the slide please? And I’m not going to go into all the details of that. It could be maybe one day, and then we do another webcast just on that. But there are different ways managers can increase returns or reduce cost. For returns, for example, what you can see on the left-hand side, what you can do is, what we do at Dimensional which is to emphasize companies that have a smaller market capitalization, that have a lower relative price or are more profitable. That’s one thing you can do. What can you do to reduce cost, for example? Well, you could try to avoid some of the rigidities associated with index investing, which is what we try to do with Dimensional, but let me just take the very first point here, and that’s the only one I cover, market exposure. 

So what’s in your portfolio? Are you as diversified as you can be? And Maria, can you go to my final slide please? And here I want to give you an idea of how different people might define the market. So on the left-hand side here, I’m showing the MSCI All Country World Index, which for some people, is as diversified as it can get, right? Some other investors might look at this, FTSE, All World Index with 4000 securities in it. At Dimensional we try to get as wide and as deep as possible, we will own something like 13,000 securities in some of our globally diversified strategies. And we do it for two reasons. The first is that, well, the more companies you own, the less risk you have, right? Because you’re now exposed to 1000s of different business models and so forth. And the other reason is that it’s good to increase returns as well. And the logic here is that returns in markets, whether you look at the returns of the equity market, or whether you look at things like the value premium or the small cap premium, these returns are usually driven by a small subset of stocks. Most stocks do not deliver on this result. So you want to really make sure that you will capture these stocks that deliver outsize return, and in our view, being as diversified as you can be is just the best way of achieving that.

Excellent. Thank you for that, Eric.

Just in the final part of the webinar, folks, and I’m conscious of time. I’m going to briefly share with you a way to put some of this information together and look at the whole area of investing. We have some questions in advance of the webinar that we’ll deal with and any other questions that come up too. If you need to go because it’s half past 10, we’re conscious of that. But if you have a question, we’re going to stay on until all the questions are finished. We’re just going to cover our investment philosophy now for about three or four minutes, and then we’re going to get into people’s questions. 

iQ Financial’s investment philosophy

So just to take the guesswork out of investing, there’s some information that we want to share with you on the main parts of our investment philosophy. So the vast majority of investment choices fall into the following three categories, equities, which means ownership of the great businesses of the world that we’ve been discussing this morning. Bonds are debt issued by governments and companies. You are, in effect, lending money to these governments or companies for a specific period of time for a set annual return, or bricks and mortar property purchased to generate a rental income and capital appreciation. It’s worth mentioning there are other asset classes that investors can use, including commodities and currencies. But these are the three main asset classes. 

Briefly, between 1926 and 2023, Eric had the 2024 numbers earlier in relation to the S%P. But in the last 100 years, the yearly return from money invested in publicly listed businesses in the world known as equities, has been 10.3% per annum, a bit higher when you include the 2024 number. It’s almost never exactly 10% with returns in individual years much higher and much lower. But over 10% is the average yearly return in that 100-year period, the return from bonds has averaged 4.7%, a good measure of the return from property is by tracking the returns on property investments called Real Estate Investment Trusts or REITs, and they have average yearly returns of 5.9% albeit there’s a much smaller choice of REITs, and they have a shorter track record than equities and bonds. And you can see how these asset classes, when you look at returns, you can see how these asset classes might affect the return you get from cash. 

If we just briefly have a look at the next slide there, Maria, so you’ll see equities at all over 10, bonds at 4.7 REITs at 5.9 the cash returns over the period have averaged much less than that. So there is a risk in choosing not to invest, because if your money doesn’t grow over time, it won’t go as far in the future. So cash under the mattress can’t keep up with inflation, and you don’t need to pick individual businesses or a small number of successful investments to have a good investment experience. You can see that over the last 100 years, the equity returns have averaged over 10% before costs and taxes. So if you can capture as much of that as possible, you’ll go a very long way towards having the returns that are going to help you meet your personal targets. 

So here’s finally, before we get to questions, here’s a way to look at the whole area of investing. If you want to reliably build wealth, the first step, and vital step in our experience is to start with your personal financial plan for you and your family. Your plan will be based on three things, your priorities, your plan and strategy for your situation, and then the investment portfolio itself. We call that your three Ps. 

The first P is your personal priorities. What are the things that are important to you? What is the cost of the living expenses that you want to provide for the rest of your days? Who do you need to provide for? What are the things that matter and why? That’s the first P, that’s your personal priorities, your personal goals. 

The second P is the planning and the strategy for your individual situation. So what are your available resources? How much time do you have to invest? How much money can you invest in your situation? And what’s the most tax efficient place to put your money to work? That’s the second P. It’s the planning and the strategy around your individual situation. 

And the final P is the investment portfolio itself. It’s the account, it’s the tax structure, it’s the asset class, it’s the investment manager that should be used to maximize the chances of you achieving your individual priorities. We can’t stress this enough. Picking the individual investment itself comes last. Once you know why you are investing your money, once you’ve checked the best way to use your available resources based on your individual situation. When you know those two things first, then and only then, should you decide how to invest money that’s available to be invested. We can’t predict the future, but we are certain that if you follow these steps, you are maximizing your chances of growing your money and having a more successful investment outcome. 

Finally, before we take some questions, we’ve mentioned this, we have a Business Owners Guide to Successful Investing. And Maria has put a link in the chat to the part of our website that has our guides. And the first guide you will see at that link is a business owners guide to successful investing. It’s a step by step, mostly bullet point overview of everything we’ve discussed today and more, and it explains how business owners should approach the whole area of investment, to take out the guesswork, help you control as much as possible and set you up to maximize your chances of success. So Maria, we can deal with some of the questions that people have now, and I know we had three in there beforehand, we can maybe deal with the ones beforehand first, yes.

Audience questions

So thanks for sending in the questions when you registered. We had one from Shane who says, what low cost funds are available?

What low cost funds are available? Do you want to talk about the cost approach from Dimensional a little bit Eric? One of the reasons, Shane, that Dimensional is one of the fund managers we use, is that they constantly try to provide the lowest costs available. So do you want to talk a little bit about the costs of the World Equity Fund, or your approach to costs? 

Yeah, I think it’s a good question. We try to keep the cost as low as possible, because we think that you know what’s what you pay in terms of cost is what you won’t get in terms of investment return. So the Ongoing Charge Figures now often are typically among the lowest decile compared to our peers. But that being said, one thing I’d like people on the line to takeaway is to not only look at the explicit cost, right? You don’t want to just look at fees. You also want to look at plenty of implicit costs that the fund might have, right? For example, if you are an index fund and you track an index, that index reconstitutes once a year, there are sometimes a pretty significant cost associated with rebalancing just once a year. At Dimensional, we adjust the portfolio every day. So that’s an example of, yes, it’s cheaper to do it once a year doesn’t mean it costs you less, just depends on how you talk about cost. But short, short answer is low.

Okay, just on the Shane our the fund that we use from Dimensional fund advisors is the Dimensional World Equity Fund, Euro version that is over 13,000 businesses in it, and in the disclosure documents that you know that we have, you will see that the Ongoing Charges Figure, which is the total estimated cost in the year, including all the transaction costs and the implicit costs that Eric is referring to, is not 0.4% per annum that that’s what its current charges are. When we started using it, it was a bit higher in the cost, in line with their work to keep chipping away at cost. It’s cost has come down. So 0.4% is one example of the lead fund or the main fund that we use from investment philosophy. We also use one other investment manager and costs are similar in that range also, but cost of funds are really important. Shane, thank you for that question. Yeah. I think we have two, at least two more from beforehand. Maria.

Yes, so we received a question from Michael, which is with the volatility in the markets now and I’m due to retire in September, would you stay and write it out or cash out now?

We’ve done a good job of trying to trying to talk about volatility today, Michael, but thank you for your question. I might take that one, Eric, I hope Michael, you have seen that volatility is a feature of the market, and in order to be in a position to get the better long-term returns that can be available, you need to be comfortable with that uncertainty. The best way that we have found to help our clients be comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with volatility, is to first to create a personal financial plan with them. So the plan will help you think long term, so that you’re you have a little bit more clarity and certainty and less likely to react to the short term events, and help you be more likely to retire when you want to. If you only take three quick events of the last couple of decades, if you take the dot com of Fall of 2000, the global financial crisis of 2008, and COVID in 2020, if you had reacted to the volatility in those three time periods, you would have lost money. So I don’t know your age, Michael, but if you’re the typical you know retirement age, you’ll be in your 60s, and you’ll hopefully have 25 to 30 more years to go. So being able to invest and get a good return is something that you very well may need to depend on and to keep doing. I’m not too sure how close to your financial independence number that you are, but I want to reassure you, Michael, that short-term volatility is the norm. It’s not unusual. First step is to have a personal financial plan, and that will help you in the in the next two or three decades, and give you a bit of clarity and peace of mind. And you know, if you want to have a chat about that, we’d be more than happy to help.

Thanks for that. So the final question we have today is from Porsche, and she asks, will every move Trump makes bring volatility to the US markets? 

You want to take that one Eric?

I mean, I think we’ve covered it a bit, right? So prices really are forward looking. The best that we can do collectively as investors is reflected in the prices today. So there could be more volatility coming up. It doesn’t mean anything in terms of what you should or should not do with your equity exposure. In our view, the fact that there is volatility is not a bad thing for investors. It’s why you are compensated for taking on exposure to the equity risk premium in the long term. 

Do we have more Maria, are we? Are we good for questions? 

Yeah, that’s all our questions for today. 

Okay. If you have any other questions, folks about what you heard today, or questions about any other financial query, we’d love to hear from you. Now Dimensional only deal with regulated intermediaries and financial planners like iQ Financial so if you have more questions for Eric, please email us and we’ll get back to you. 

If you go to our website, which is www.iqf.ie you can book some time in our diaries using the Book A Learn More Call button at the top, where we can learn more about your query. And you can email us at clients@iqf.ie or call us on 0719155560. 

Thanks a million for your time this morning. We’re over 40 minutes, and we appreciate you staying on during the webinar. Special, thanks to Eric Geffroy from Dimensional, for his time and his insights today. Thanks a million Eric, and also to Paul Catt Camfield from Dimensional for helping to set this up for us. We hope you got value from the webinar. We’d appreciate any feedback you have to help us improve future events. We’re running two more webinars this year addressing the most important questions that our business owner clients ask us and we hope to see you next time. Thank you very much.