Welcome to the Crazy Wealthy Podcast, hosted by Jonathan Blau, CEO of Fusion Family Wealth. In this episode, Jonathan welcomes his first official guest, Harvey Radler, a close friend for over three decades and a seasoned investment and wealth management expert for over five decades. Together, they dive into Harvey's extensive background, the impact of early commission-based sales tactics, and the challenges of the industry’s shift to fee-based, client-centered models. From the infamous Bernie Madoff story to insights on market uncertainty, Harvey provides knowledge on navigating the complexities of today’s financial markets and the importance of staying the course.

IN THIS EPISODE:

• [5:34] Harvey Radler shares his background and history of selling stock
• [11:34] The Bernie Madoff story
• [15:36] Converting to commission-based fees
• [19:57] Buying investments to lose money
• [23:44] Certainty is not available in financial markets 
• [31:10] Sticking to your plan

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Aggressive sales tactics in early stock trading spurred the creation of mutual funds for centralized management, benefiting tax-deferred pensions but causing tax issues for individual investors, leading to the development of SMAs and tax-efficient index funds like the S&P 500. Despite these advancements, investors remain susceptible to emotional biases like fear and greed, often leading to poor decisions.
• The shift from commission-based to fee-based and discretionary accounts marked a major change in the investment industry, aligning advisors' interests with their client's interests by charging a percentage fee based on assets rather than individual trades. This model encouraged advisors to prioritize clients' long-term success as fees increased with portfolio growth. 
• Certainty in financial markets is an illusion driven by claims of predictive expertise through forecasts, stock analysis, and fund managers. Despite assurances, consistent outperformance and market timing remain elusive, often causing investors to overreact instead of gaining clarity.

GUEST BIOGRAPHY: 

Harvey, Managing Director of Fusion Family Wealth, brings over 60 years of investment expertise to the firm, where he also serves as vice-chair of the investment committee. He and Jonathan Blau co-founded the Blau Radler Group in 2000. Harvey’s career includes roles at Wertheim & Co./Schroders, Prudential Securities, Sanford Bernstein, and Morgan Stanley, and he served on the NYSE disciplinary panel for 25 years. A Wharton School graduate, Harvey’s deep industry experience continues to benefit Fusion’s clients.

ABOUT THE HOST: Jonathan is the President and CEO of Fusion Family Wealth, founded in 2013 to focus on behavioral finance and guide clients toward rational financial decisions. A sought-after speaker in wealth management, Jonathan previously held senior roles in tax and estate planning at Arthur Andersen. He has a BS in Finance, an MS in Taxation, and an MBA in Accounting. Based on Long Island, Jonathan is active in the local business community, supports causes like the Middle Market Alliance and Sunrise Day Camp, and enjoys boating with his family.

RESOURCE LINKS 

Fusion Family Wealth - Website

Jonathan Blau - LinkedIn

Harvey Radler - LinkedIn

Please Note: No individual has been provided nor promised any direct or indirect economic benefit for sharing Fusion podcasts/articles/opinions. No post should be construed as any assurance that a reader will find the podcast/article/opinion beneficial.

Please click below for important disclosure information.

https://www.fusionfamilywealth.com/disclosures

CRAZYWEALTHY_Ep02_102424

A copy of Fusion's current written disclosure brochure discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or at www.fusionfamilywealth.com.

Voice Over: Welcome to the crazy, wealthy podcast with your host, Jonathan Blau, whether you're just starting out or are an experienced investor, join Jonathan as he seeks to illuminate and demystify the complexities of making consistently rational financial decisions under conditions of uncertainty. He'll chat with professionals from the advice world, entrepreneurs, executives, and more to share fresh perspectives.

on making sound decisions that maximize your wealth. And now here's your host.

And today I'm, I'm very Proud and pleased to to have as our first official guest on the podcast Harvey Radler, with whom I've I've been working on behalf of our clients for, for the better part of the last three decades. And Harvey's going to share with us his, his more than five decades of experience in, in the investment and wealth management space.

So I've let that cat out of the bag, but, but boiler room really refers to the old days when When people were in were in a, a, a dark space and presenting or pitching stocks to clients in order to make a commission and, and, and, and that that mode of, of financial advice, so to speak, went out the window and, and from, from there.

The industry came up with with concepts like mutual funds, which were ways to to get investors access to centralize the high level money management and money managers. The problem with mutual funds is they were, they were created for the pension industry and pension investors are not subject to taxation.

Then from there, the industry's solution to the tax inefficiencies while still giving access to centralized managers for lower minimums was called separately managed accounts or SMAs, and separately managed accounts gave you again access to the same money manager, but you weren't buying into a pre existing set of investments that might have been invested beginning 10 or 20 years earlier, so that if you bought into the mutual fund that did that, you actually also bought into a gain that was accrued over 10 or 20 years prior to you getting And when the mutual fund would sell the stock that had the game, even though you just invested in it this year, you would have to pay the tax on the game.

S. And and index funds brought the Tax efficiency to the investor because when they buy and sell or replace one stock with another in the index, there's no immediate tax to the investor. And at the same time, they're very low cost. So boiler room to behavior is the idea that. What I've learned over the many decades in the business that I've, I've, I've been experiencing advice and, and what helps investors make decisions is that whether they invested mutual funds, index funds, or any other method of gaining exposure to investors in great companies as stockholders, they were still prone to make the same behavioral mistakes regardless of How they own their stocks, it was still prone to react to fear and greed and envy in the same way and to to react to the built in biases that we all [00:05:00] have, either faulty reasoning based biases or emotional biases and, and sell their stocks in reaction to fear and buy them back all too late after, after the all clear.

Signal went off and whatever prices they were afraid of got resolved So with that i'd like to introduce harvey rather harvey welcome to the crazy wealthy podcast

Harvey Radler: Well, it feels a little crazy But as jonathan said at the top of the show, so to speak we've been working together for close to three decades And he just stole my whole speech.

I don't feel like 83. Hopefully I don't look like

Jonathan Blau: 83. Harvey, along those lines, do me a favor. I'd like to share with everybody your perspective of what advice in the financial industry was like before electricity. Thank you.

Harvey Radler: Well, that's what I'm going to do. Okay. I'm going to try and take everybody, as I said, on this so called Magical Mystery Tour and give you a little my background and how I got into the into the financial arena.

I I was born and brought up in a small town upstate New York, and my parents had a I hope some of you people who are listening or will listen will know what that is. But Like Woolworths. Okay. For those of you who remember, and that, if

Jonathan Blau: they don't know, if they don't know five and 10, they ain't going to know Woolworths.

Exactly.

And here I am. So I guess I didn't do so well in Accounting 1A. And my parents had a friend who was involved with a small brokerage firm. And during the summers, he got me a job at And I fell in love. So I started working at this small brokerage firm and I learned the business as as Jonathan may remember, I really started from the ground up.

And eventually I wound up be becoming a broker and trying to gather assets. Then what did I do with the assets that I was going to gather? I had to make money. How did we make money? You made money by commissions. And so the concept really in those days, you call the client and you said I think you ought to buy 500 chairs of X, Y, Z it's trading at 20 and here's why.

And when it got to 25, We called them back and said you ought to sell your 500 shares of XYZ because it's up 25 percent and you know, that's not Harvey.

Sometimes you bought it at 20 hoping to go to 25, but sold it at 10 and bought something else with the hope of going.

Harvey Radler: Absolutely. Let's go very good, which goes back to how did we make money? We made money via the commission route. Okay. And that was not doing the best thing for the client. Okay. So I stuck with that for some time.

Jonathan Blau: don't you, just for the audience who wouldn't know what that means, over the counter stocks, it'd be just a little bit of a little bit of a, not

Harvey Radler: companies that are listed on either the new, were listed on either the New York The American Stock Exchange, but were traded on what became NASDAQ, and it was done by something called the Pink Sheets.

Everybody got these sheets, and it showed you what all these companies were trading for, and it showed you a bid and ask for those companies, and you went out and you tried to buy them. Et cetera, et cetera. It was a Harvey,

It wasn't really. An official price

Harvey Radler: without question. It was not an auction market. Okay. Right. As we were used to on the New York Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange. So I went to visit this guy at his offices. And as I was walking out and I was 22 years older, he said to me, I want to introduce you to somebody that just joined our firm.

And in

Jonathan Blau: fact, in fact one of the things I remember is, is when Harvey and I left a firm, we, we, we met at was Sanford Bernstein, which is now Alliance Bernstein at the time we joined both of us. It was the largest privately owned money management firm in the country. And we were in what was called the lipstick building.

So I went to meet Bernie Madoff, I'd only met him, Incidentally here and there in the lobby and Harvey. So you remember Jonathan and so forth. This was the first time I've ever had a real meeting with him. And what was interesting is he was asking me questions relating to the money managers that Harvey and I were using and what kind of research that we used and [00:13:00] had access to.

And I went back and said to Harvey, you always tell me this man quietly is one of the most successful guys in the business that most people don't know about. And what in the world is he asking me at the time? I'm 31 or 32 years old. about the research that we use. It was very it seemed very fishy to me.

And that was the first time my antenna kind of went up about burning Madoff. I literally sat in his office and and after that, we, I never really met with him again, although he did send Harvey and I a client a fellow who Passed away in the last four or five years who at the time was, was ill.

And I guess Bernie had some sympathy for him because he called Harvey and said, I have someone I want you to meet. I I'm not taking new clients right now. Right, Harvey? You remember that? Exactly. And

Which was basically an investment [00:14:00] banking firm, but had a small retail brokerage business and I took my client base there and I was sitting in my office at Wertheim Company. When a young man came into my office, he wasn't so young, he was a few years older than I, and he said to me, I have three questions for you.

He said, Do you have an older brother? I said, Yes. He said, Did he go to Cornell? I said, Yes. And the guy says, His name was Warren, right? I said, Yes. He said, He and I went to college together. And this fellow and I sort of fell in love with each other. And we merged our practices together. And we started doing similar things for our clients.

We still picked stocks. But it was more organized and more professional. So Harvey,

He he went against all of the convention of conventions of Wall Street at the time, because in those days, there was a lot of scandal attached to what was called discretionary accounts. People were taking discretion, meaning they can do trades without their clients, okaying them, and they were taking advantage of clients.

And during that time, Bernstein formed his whole firm with the idea that the not only they're going to do discretionary accounts, but that's all they're going to do was discretionary accounts and, and and, and the other thing that he did against convention was people were laughing at him for doing discretionary accounts.

Why? Because you guys think it's, it's, it's, it's a good business decision. to situate your business in the middle of all your competitors. I want to situate my business midtown where all my clients are. So, so that, that was, that was brilliant. But you then really in 74, one of the few firms also to adopt discretionary money management and, and, and bring Bring as you say, the alignment with the client because you're charging a fee for service, not a commission per trade.

And that in those days really became a differentiator, I think. And, and you, I would say we're a pioneer in, in what's now known as the separately managed account business.

And Jonathan, you're so right. It's up. It, there were many times when it went from 20 to 15 and not from 20 to 25. But the motive to create the commission was still there,

Jonathan Blau: unfortunately. Right. And the excuse was there too, right? Hey, it's not doing what we thought we ought to sell it and get into something else that we think is going to do better.

Money management discretionary money management, and they would then be sending him their clients money to manage as opposed to them buying and selling stocks and so forth. And and what what Harvey and I did when we both joined Bernstein in 96, Harvey joined because something happened at Prudential where in those days, they had a partnership.

So because of that a lot of the brokers left And along with that they took their clients and that impacted Harvey's business. So he then joined Sanford Bernstein in 96. And I joined Sanford Bernstein coincidentally in 96. We met each other, we liked each other and we had a six month training program, which Harvey will describe to you in a little bit of detail.

But when, when we met at Bernstein and we adopted Bernstein's strategy, which was known as value, that's what they were. They were value investors. There's two main styles. And what we learned after a few years at Bernstein was even though their past performance was good when we had joined them suddenly everybody remembers the dot com bubble.

So, so they were getting sued and the whole investment world was saying, you know, we don't want to own these things. It's terrible. They're getting sued, but people didn't appreciate what Bernstein's research appreciated, which is the elasticity of demand. People were going to smoke tobacco, whether, whether the price went up by 20 percent or not.

In one style like value, money managers are specialized in value in growth and small companies and large. And we thought that was going to be an answer to the problem of of, of finding them one money manager in one style who couldn't consistently outperform their benchmark, the S& P 500. And Harvey, what did we learn when we went to Morgan Stanley?

Harvey Radler: We learned that it's all the same. We were just trying to. To match or exceed what was then called the benchmark, which really wasn't relevant to what the clients really needed.

And what we always tell people is certainty in the financial markets is not available, but I take it further. Certainty doesn't exist anywhere as a condition in nature. And so what the industry has always done is they hand the client back To satisfy the need for certainty what I call the illusion of certainty And what do I mean by that?

They parade out how many analysts they have in each industry So they claim they'll be able to tell the client which sector and company to get in and out of and when Based on based on their research. They claim to have a tremendous insight into the economy with all their economists so that they can consistently forecast the economy tell you when a recession is coming, for example, and then help you get in and out of the market, gain a timing advantage consistently over the markets by, by by employing their economic findings.

And of course it can't consistently be done. And so by having the illusion of certainty in the form of economic forecasting company analysis and manager superiority claims all the industry was doing was giving the clients more things to react to, not fewer. right? The ultimate underperformance that one manager had to eventually have versus the others.

Since the beginning of 2022, we've been told by our industry that a recession is around the corner and going on almost three years now, the recession has not come just like Godot. So, so what we learned is, is that. The important thing for client is to define the benchmark because a client, an investor rightly might ask, well, if I can't measure you against the S& P, well, whatever the benchmark is, how do I know if you're doing a good job?

And the answer is straightforward. It's, it's your plan. Every client doesn't have to be a written formal plan, but should have a date specific and dollar specific plan. Every investor that that they want to get to a certain point. Okay. accumulate a certain amount of money so that they can retire comfortably and stay comfortably retired.

What it means is we're attracted to higher prices. And we're repelled by things when they go on sale as it relates to our investments in every other part of our economic economic life. We behave in a way that's called contra cyclical behavior where we're attracted to sales to lower prices and we're repelled by goods and services when they price.

I'm buying at these higher prices and somehow there's less risk buying at these higher prices. And when there's a big sale, like there was in 2000. And two, when the dot com bubble bursts, I think that by investing in these great companies at these now lower sale prices, I'm taking on more risk and my future returns from the assets and earnings I'm buying at these deeply discounted prices will somehow be less.

underperformed and go to the one that just outperformed for three years. And the one that just outperformed is likely to underperform because of something called reversion to the mean. Outperformance can consistently continue forever. And when somebody does better than average, at some point they're going to do worse than average.

So that's what we learned. And we learned that over the years the study show, for example, 90 percent or more of professionals, money managers and mutual funds who try to outperform the benchmark, whether it's the S& P or whatever benchmark they measured against, failed to do it. And, and that's 90%, but the challenge is.

But my challenge isn't that my challenge was to identify those 115 years ago and stay with them through all their idiosyncratic moves up and down. And so by using index funds, Investors take away the illusion that you could outperform the benchmark and that even it's important. It's irrelevant to outperform the benchmark.

It's important to have a plan and to fund that plan with investments more as an owner of stocks. Then a loaner more as a stockholder that bondholder because the returns for stocks for the last 100 10 percent a year. And after inflation 3, they've been 7, the return for an equivalent portfolio bonds have been 6 percent a year and after inflation, it's been 3.

Harvey Radler: without question.

And And more importantly you've to use one of your words. You've acculturated the clients to understand that The key is forget the noise, turn off the noise, the financial press, CNBC, et cetera, et cetera. Your plan is your benchmark. And that's really what we talk to the clients about. And We've been very fortunate that in periods like of disruption, such as we've had over the last 10, 15 years, our clients have been able to stay and not get nervous, so to speak.

Harvey Radler: Let me just finish by saying, I'll go back to what I said earlier when I started in 1974 and converted my book of business, a brokerage business to a fee based So to speak, I step, I sat on the same side of the table as the clients and that has stood us in very good stead over all these years.

So john, I agree. We

Jonathan Blau: always did a good job for our clients, but the behavior has, I think, taken the ability to do a good job to a whole whole other level. And, thank you all for listening to this podcast. Thank you Harvey for agreeing to be really our first guest on the podcast series and Everybody if you if you like the podcast, please like and share it.

Voice Over: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Crazy Wealthy Podcast. For more insights, resources, and to sign up for our newsletter, visit crazywealthypodcast. com. Until then, stay crazy wealthy.

Disclaimer: The previous podcast by Fusion Family Wealth, LLC, Fusion, was intended for general information purposes only. No portion of the podcast serves as the receipt of or as a substitute for personalized investment advice from Fusion or any other investment professional of your choosing. Different types of investments involve varying degrees of risk, and it should not be assumed that future performance of any specific investment or investment strategy or any non investment related or planning services, discussion, or content will be profitable, be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation.

No portion of the video content should be construed by a client or prospective client as a guarantee that he or she will experience a certain level of results or satisfaction. If fusion is engaged or continues to be engaged to provide investment advisory services, a copy of fusion's current written disclosure brochure, discussing our advisory services and fees is available upon request or www.

fusionfamilywealth. com.