Protecting your nest egg in a recession
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Put protection takes a lot of time (to understand). Puts are an option so they're a zero-sum game. What that means is for every winner there has to be a loser. What individuals don't want to do is compete with Wall Street. Those people do it for a living and they're trying to win.

You've heard the same commercials I've heard on the radio -- "We're going to show you how to make money in any market, we've got these trade-by-colors type thing." Well, if you're 25 years old maybe that's OK. But if you're 50-plus and you're gearing up for retirement, the last thing you want to do is play with your future.

People need to understand how those strategies work.

Don't use defensive strategies as a gambling technique to try to get rich while the market's falling, but rather as a hedge to try to prevent event-driven declines, or a decline you're not expecting, from destroying your portfolio.

What do you think?

Insurance for the portfolio
It's all about greed. It's all about how much can I make on the upside. Our contention is, it's not how much money you make, it's how much you get to keep that's most important. Bad markets can take a heck of a lot of money away. When you're 40 years old, you've got lots of time to recover. The bulk of our boomers are past 50 and there are no mulligans after that age. The only mulligan you get is to work for 20 more years.

People who have protection strategies on their portfolios need to understand that when the markets are racing ahead, they won't keep up. They'll lag behind a little bit because a portion of their money is in a strategy that's designed to protect. It's like paying an insurance premium to protect your portfolio. If you were just looking for pure return on real estate, for example, you'd never buy insurance on your house because it's just an expense that takes away from your total return. Well, that's just silly. No one would own real estate without insuring it. Yet people all day long want to talk about their investments yet they don't want to pay a little bit extra to ensure that something bad is not going to take it away. Somehow they're magically smart enough to predict what's going to happen.

How to choose an adviser
If a client is getting ready to retire in five years and we know out of the $1.2 million that person has that $750,000 of it is absolutely critical to their ability to retire and the other half-million is going to allow them to do the extras, we probably don't need to insure the half-million but we need to insure the $750,000.

What to invest in now
I think we have some room to go before the recession hits and that technology is going to be one of the leaders over the next several months. In any industry, when a new product comes to market there's zero market penetration for that product. It takes quite some time to get from a zero percent market penetration to 10 percent. And then you have a very rapid movement from 10 percent to 90 percent. It takes as long to get from zero percent to 10 percent as it did to get from 10 percent to 90 percent. And then it takes as long to get from 90 percent to 100 percent as it did to get from zero percent to 10 percent. Most of our major technologies that have been driving our economy for the last 16 to 17 years are at about 80 percent market penetration. Once we hit 90 percent market penetration, that technology will cap out and the profits in those companies will begin to fall. But companies are going to fight to get that last 10 percent. I think it will create some euphoria in that arena that will allow technology to make a splash.