Podcast 172. Precious Metals Portfolio Allocation and Diversification with Patrick Yip

Average Joe Finances:
0:00

Hey, Welcome back to the Average Joe Finances podcast. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni, and today's guest is Patrick Yip, with APMEX so Patrick, super excited to have you on especially with some of the stuff we're gonna talk about today with precious metals and things like that. Stuff that you don't really hear too much about on this podcast that I think might be interesting to some of our listeners. So thank you so much for joining me.

Patrick Yip:
0:21

Hey, thanks for having me on, Mike.

Average Joe Finances:
0:23

Yeah, absolutely. Hey, I wanna start things off the same way I start every podcast episode and we wanna know more about you. So if you could share a little bit about yourself, share your story. Who is Patrick? Yip.

Patrick Yip:
0:34

Yeah, great question. So I am the Director of Business Development at APMEX in One Gold. And APMEX, for those of you who don't know, is one of the largest online precious metals retailers in the us. So we sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium bars, rounds of coins. The business has existed for over 20 years. It's done about 15 billion in lifetime sales, so pretty big dealer over here. I've been with the company for over 11 years. I've held various roles in merchandising, product management marketplaces, and now business development. Most recently I became, I began running running one Gold, which is an online investment platform owned by apmex, which allows customers to own vaulted positions of gold, silver, and platinum. And One Gold has done about 750 million in transactions in its first three years of business. And then another thing, I was involved is launching the first ever precious metals rewards credit card. It's actually called the bullying card. I have one over here too. It's a pretty neat concept. The first in, in its kind. I've actually partnered with a bank called UMB Bank and partnered with Visa to get that live.

Average Joe Finances:
1:31

That's pretty awesome. Actually I'm not sure if I've actually heard of that card before. But the fact that it's it's tied to actual precious metals.

Patrick Yip:
1:39

Yeah.

Average Joe Finances:
1:39

Is that part of the rewards, like instead of cash back, you get gold percentage of silver back gold.

Patrick Yip:
1:43

Yeah. Yep. That's exactly how that works.

Average Joe Finances:
1:45

Wow. That's pretty interesting. All right. So I wanted to ask you cause as you were, giving your background and I appreciate it, like the it's descriptive and a lot to talk about coming outta there. Can you tell me what the difference is between somebody. Just goes and buys like a gold ETF versus a vaulted position. What's the difference between the two of those.

Patrick Yip:
2:04

Yeah, so there's several ways to own gold. There's one way is the buying the physical product. And when you do that, I would recommend you find a reputable, incredible dealer, such as at APMEX. But the way that works is it's like an e-commerce site. You go online, you find the product you want. You add it to your cart, you buy it and it gets shipped to your house, and then you can, you decide where to store it. So you can store it in a safe, safety deposit box, hide it under your mattress, whatever you wanna do with it. That's one option is basically the physical precious metals. Another option is what I call like a vaulted solution through one gold. And we could get into one gold layer too. But on a high level, what it is I almost call it like a Robinhood or Coinbase, four precious metals. It's a way to basically own precious metals super intuitive flow. You basically create an account. Decide whether you want gold, silver, or platinum fund that. Buy your metal and then it's stored in a vault, so either Brinks or Loomis Vault fully audited, fully insured, but it's for the customers that don't necessarily want to take possession of that gold. I know I get a lot of customers ask. They're like, okay, so I get a gold coin. What do I do with it? Now? I just hide it. Just some people are, don't feel comfortable doing that, and definitely I would not recommend that if you have a large amount of money, let's say you have a six figure or seven figure sum of money you want to put into gold, not the best idea to keep that in your house. And then the third way to buy gold is through an ETF, like you mentioned. Some of the most popular ones are the GLD and SLV. Couple things I would be aware of. If you do get into those, and I personally. Touch them and there's several reasons, but one of them is they say the metal is actually not insured in the GLD and SLV. So the worst thing that could happen on one of these is you get invested in the GLD, gold go up, you made the right investment, and then someday the vault you stored it at got hacked, audited, whatever, or hacked, someone broke into it, stole the metal, and basically all your metal's gone. So that, that's, those are three high level ways to own precious metals.

Average Joe Finances:
3:49

Okay. Yeah, so that, that's interesting cause I always thought like the ETFs were like, basically you just own like a certificate saying that, you have this portion of gold. Like you don't actually own the physical gold itself, like in a vault.

Patrick Yip:
4:01

That is correct.

Average Joe Finances:
4:01

That's interesting.

Patrick Yip:
4:02

If you look at the prospectus in detail, so it actually, when you buy a share of GLD, you're buying a share into a trust. And the trust, right? Essentially own is.

Average Joe Finances:
4:10

Stacked by gold. Yeah.

Patrick Yip:
4:11

That's exactly correct. And then a couple another issue too is your, okay, where's this gold held? They said it could be held at a custodian, could h be held at a sub custodian? or a sub custodian of a sub custodian, which means I was like, that's a little weird. So it's Mike, if I said, here, hold my gold coin, and you're like, oh, don't worry. I gave it to my friend and your friend's oh, don't worry. I gave it to my friend's friend. It's what, Mike, do you still hold my gold? Or did you lose it somewhere? So there's a lot of risk with ETFs especially the GLD and SLV.

Average Joe Finances:
4:37

Yeah. Where's that chain of custody? That's scary actually when you think about it. Okay, so I'm pretty interested though so those vaulted positions where you actually, you own that gold and it's actually stored in a vault and it's insured, right? So if something was to happen, you would still maybe get your money back or how does that work if something was to happen to that vault? The one that you are in and it's insured and you're like, okay, I have maybe 50k in gold and silver stored at this vault. What happens if that place gets taken out or something.

Patrick Yip:
5:05

Yeah. Let me start by giving a little more detailed overview about. About one gold. So back in 2018 at APMEX. So our parent company partnered with Sprout Asset Management. And what Sprout Asset Management is, it's a large alternative asset manager out of Canada with about 22 billion under management. And the reason we partnered together was to come up with one goal, basically a modern way to purchase precious metals. So as I mentioned, one goal's, an online investment platform that allows you to buy, own and trade vaulted positions of gold, silver, and platinum. You get to choose which vault you want. So it is either in the. Either in Canada, Switzerland, or the UK. And what One Gold First does is it has agreements with vaulting companies. So like a Brinks, a Loomis, credible, well-known vaulting names. It then buys large commercial bars of gold and silver. So you imagine these bars that you see in big movie scenes where if someone robs a bank and you get these big 400 ASCO bars.

Average Joe Finances:
5:55

Down the Fort Knots.

Patrick Yip:
5:56

Yeah. So it's that stuff that One Gold actually buys it sort, it stores it at Brinks and Loomis and then it lists the metal for sale. And then let's say, Mike, you. You buy gold in the US you buy some US gold. That metal is actually owned by you. You have title to it. It doesn't appear up on one gold's balance sheet. And let's say for whatever reason, you're a big whale and you wanna purchase tens of millions of dollars of gold. It's more gold than we currently have available for purchase. We actually won't sell you that gold until we're able to source more. So we're not gonna sell you on Unbacked promise. The metal is all insured. So it's insured by like Lloyds of London. Or the rural Canadian mint. If you're in Canada, it's regularly audited by a top five accounting firm. So they go twice a year to look at that, count the inventory. We also post regular monthly inventory reports on our website showing the list of bars, the purities. So you exactly know what's in there. And let's say you said, Hey, I like this vaulted solution, but. one day you're like, I really want the physical. I don't want this vaulted solution anymore. You could actually go through our redemption option and easily swap that out for a physical product. And obviously there's a small premium depending on what product you pay or what product you buy. So if you want a small coin, it's gonna cost more than if you got a larger bar.

Average Joe Finances:
7:02

Okay. Yeah. Actually, that was gonna be one of my next questions too, was like, Hey, what if you wanted to like, Switch from that vault to position to get that physical gold. So that makes perfect sense. Yeah, so I definitely appreciate that. I think it's something that, you know don't know. I was asking that because I always pictured in my mind the people that have a lot of precious metals and stuff, and they have it like piled up and then somebody just comes in and I'm here to rob the bank. Like all the stuff like in the old cartoons back in the day. Yeah. So that flashes through my head. The way that you described, the way that everything's set up and how often it gets audited and everything it seems like a very safe place to keep your investment right. To actually hold your precious metal. I just wanted to point that out there, so I appreciate that. Now why should investors consider. Maybe, owning some precious metals.

Patrick Yip:
7:45

Yeah, that's a great question too. So I think if you look at the news, you turn on the news the hot topic right now is inflation. So you're seeing inflation as running at 8.2% year over year, basically the highest level in 40 plus years. Does every, everyone's aware of those facts. You see it over and every time you turn on the tv. So I like to see what could history teach? About precious metals and various asset classes. So as I mentioned, inflation's at a 40 plus year high. Unfortunately, we have to go back prior to 1980 to look at data because inflation hasn't been high since, 40 some years. So if you look first of all the 1960s, you had an inflationary cycle and it took the fed nine years to resolve that inflationary cycle. So certainly a lot longer. They expected. And then you fast forward a little bit later in the 1970s, you had another inflationary cycle and it took the Fed five years to resolve that. So where are we today? Inflation, just last year in January, 2021 was only 1.4%. So we're almost two years into the cycle. So let's look at how different asset classes perform. So obviously one of the worst things you could do during inflation is cash. But let's see what cash did. So let's say you helped cash five years of 8.2% inflation. That's gonna erode about 35% of the cash is purchasing power, obviously not ideal. Let's say inflation lasts nine years. That 8.2% inflation compounded over nine years is gonna override 55% of your purchasing power. So clearly not a great solution. Don't hold cash during an inflationary period. Let's look at it. Stocks, for example, and by stocks, I'm looking at the S&P 500. So in the 1960s, you look at what happened to the S&P, it actually lost over 20%. And keep in mind, inflation hit as high as about 12% in the 1960s. So you got hit nominally by your stocks going down, plus you got hit with inflation. So stocks didn't really do so well in the 1960s. You look at the 1970s, little bit different. So stocks didn't lose value, but they were up 4%. So little bit better. However, inflation hit almost 15% in the 1970s, so not the greatest outcome. And then lastly, you look at gold. So what did gold do in the 1960s during that inflationary period? It went up from 35 to$200, so a five x move. And then you look at the 1970s and gold had a similar move up, eight x from 100 up to 850. So if history repeats, obviously no one knows. Time will tell if history repeats or rhymes or doesn't repeat. But if history does repeat, goals are likely to do well.

Average Joe Finances:
10:00

So patrick, you don't have your little crystal ball going to try to figure out where this is gonna go or what

Patrick Yip:
10:05

So I wish I did, but I could say I'm heavier than I'm typically in gold and I'm feeling comfortable with it right now.

Average Joe Finances:
10:12

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Great point. And I like how you're talking about how it's these inflationary periods not, we have inflation every year. But the way you're describing it is like these periods of this higher inflation, which we're starting to feel the effects of that now. So I think we're gonna find 2022 was a pretty bad year for inflation by the time the end of the year hits. And I don't see the road looking too great for the start of 2023 either. Who knows how long this is gonna go, like you said. But at the same time. Let's talk about some of the trends of of gold right now. Where has gold been? Like the past, let's say five years, right? What does the value look like today versus five years ago?

Patrick Yip:
10:48

Yeah. So a lot of times people look at the short-term price movements, and I would say, let's look at the bigger picture, because gold, I look at it as a longer term hold. It's just like a stock, just like a bond. You don't want get into stock and flip it a month later that no, no one knows where anything's gonna go short-term, but you want to get into something and in invest in it for hopefully at least a couple years. So I look at it too, and you look. At Gold in 2022. And if you took the average daily price, there has never been a time in history where gold has been this high. So it's basically at an all time high by averaging taking the average annual price. You could, some people would say yeah, it's down. Yeah, it was. It was 18, 1900 earlier in this year. Now it's 1625. Yeah, it is down, that's looking at a couple month horizon. I would. Expand your horizon past that. It's just like you look at stocks, for example. Stocks are down significantly in 2022. I think they're probably gonna struggle in the next several years, but over time, let's say 10, 15, 20 years from now, I'd be surprised if stocks were not materially higher than where they are today. So I would say expand your time horizon. I would say gold's basically trending up. I think it has a lot of room to run.

Average Joe Finances:
11:52

Okay. Yeah, no, great. I appreciate that. Now, So we touched on this a little bit, but like the various different ways to own precious metals. What are some of the pros and cons of each of those? Like I know you described for the vault positions, at least I know with one goal, the way you guys do it, how it's insured and it's pretty safe. I'm not too worried about that. But what about some of those other positions? What are some of the pros and cons of physically holding gold.

Patrick Yip:
12:15

Yeah, so I would recommend that everyone starts with physical, too. Physical is a great way to get started. The nice part about it, it's tangible. It's off the grid. No one knows you have it. No one could hack it away from you. You could easily pass it from generation to generation. If you have family members, you have kids. No one needs to know you just pass a large amount. Taxes are tough, self-reported lot of good benefits about holding physical gold. Couple of the downsides too, is especially when it comes time to liquidate depending on where you are, it's a little more difficult to liquidate than a position like an ETF or a vaulted solution, like one gold where you just click a couple buttons and then it's liquidated. With physical gold, you have to find, just like buying gold, you wanna find a reputable dealer to buy from. When you're selling the gold, you also have to find a reputable dealer to sell to. You wanna make sure that they're not gouging you on price, obviously APMEX is a reputable dealer. We're based in Oklahoma City. Not everyone's in Oklahoma City, so chances are you have to ship your gold over there, which has a cost. So the transaction costs with physical is a little higher. And one of the big things I say with physical too is everyone I've mentioned who got started in physical, they started with a couple thousand dollars. The couple thousand dollars turned to tens of thousands. And maybe if we're fortunate enough, it turns to six or 57 figure sub. So the problem about. With a six or seven figure sum of gold in your house is, where are you gonna put it? I You could have a nice safe, but all it takes is one guy breaking into your

house at 3:
13:34

00 AM with a knife or a gun, and you know your family's there. You hope it never happens, but you know. It's just not the best solution to have any large amount of value, whether in gold or jewelry or anything else that has a lot of tangible value, not the best solution to keep it in your house. And that's where one gold comes in, is we have customers and one of our largest customers spent north of 10 million on one gold. And he had the same concerns too. It's like where do you put 10 million of physical gold?

Average Joe Finances:
14:02

Yeah, that's fantastic. I When you think about it, what are you gonna do? Put it all on a treasure chest and bury it in your backyard, put an X over it or something, But actually I do know I've heard of people doing that. Like they'll they like to bury their precious metals like around their yard in certain spots. But, if somebody knows that you're doing that, you might wake up one morning and be like, oh, look the lawn's getting redone. Yeah, no that's that's a great point. So actually let's talk about that then. So if somebody decided they wanted to switch that physical into a vaulted position now you said that there's of course there's a cost, especially if they got a ship to Oklahoma City. I live in Hawaii. That would be ridiculous. It would probably cost me more to senate there than it would cost to, to actually hold it. Yep. Because of the weight. I mean it's a metal, right? It's not like it's this light piece of wood or something. It is heavy metal, right? If somebody decided they wanted to, turn it in and shift it over are they looking at some premiums with that as well? Besides shipping it? Or what does that look like?

Patrick Yip:
14:52

Yeah. So if you have physical metal and you wanna get it into a vaulted solution, a lot of times the physical metal has a small premium over it. And I almost say it's if you looked at coffee, for example, coffee's trading at $2 on the commodity exchange. If you go to Starbucks, you're not paying$2 for a pound of Starbucks coffee. There's a premium because true there there's a cost for Starbucks to make this package it and do all this other stuff that they need to do to distribute the coffee. Just like gold for example, it could be trading at, let's say, 1600 and change on the c commodities exchange. You may pay north of 1700 for a coin. And the reason for that is it needs to be made into a smaller denomination. The mints the refineries, wherever you buy the coin or bar has to stamp it out. It's just gonna say, Hey, fine, gold 9, 9, 9, 9, fine. It's, they have the mark on there. So there's a premium to that. As I mentioned, with one Gold, you're getting into large industrial bars basically like the stuff in movies. So a lot of times let's say you had a gold coin and you wanted to sell this. For our vaulted solution, you could sell to APMEX. And we like to provide a two-way market. So we buy and sell product. You could sell it to us. Chances are we're gonna pay you over the price of gold just because that coin has a premium over the gold content. And you may be able to get, I dunno, 1.05 ounces of gold and a vaulted solution. So there is a premium and we do pay that too. When you transact between vault and physical.

Average Joe Finances:
16:07

Okay. That's great to know. So it's also a premium that, that the the precious metal owner can benefit from as well. And I totally get that because, when you look at the actual creation of the coin or the bar, you've got people that are actually melting it down, turning it into that bar or coin, right? That, you got to pay for that. That takes time. There, there's people actually working to do that. They got to get paid. So that's where that premium's coming from totally understandable. Okay. Now what kind of trends are you seeing right now, Patrick, in the precious metals industry?

Patrick Yip:
16:36

Yeah, so I could say trends are, we're seeing a lot of demand in the last couple years. So let's go back a couple years too. 2019 before Covid was our last normal year of precious metals demand. We sold about a billion dollars in retail sales to customers. So this is metal on APMEX. Or physical delivery. 2020 obviously came by. We had covid. We saw the march correction where everything took a plummet for a short term. We saw our customers increase about 1.5 X from 2019, and we doubled our sales. So basically 2 million in precious metals went out from our facility, two retail customers, and then looking at 2021. We thought 2020 was an oddball. We're like, that's gonna be tough to beat if you just doubled and keep in mind doubling from a billion is not an easy thing. It's not like I went from 10 to 20,000. We went from one to 2 billion, which is, quite a bit of metal moving out of our facility. So 2021 proved us wrong. So we actually. Saw a doubling of our customers from 2019, and we easily smashed through that 2 billion mark. Just no problem. And then 2022 has been a record year again. So in March of 2022 we actually had our best month ever. So we sold about 260 million in products to retail investors. So a lot of people are seeing that precious metals are gonna be a good investment in the next couple years. So they're running to it, and obviously that's reflected in our sales.

Average Joe Finances:
17:48

Yeah. That's insane though, like with how much it's increased. Especially during the pandemic cause you see there was a lot of the stock market ebbed and fluid a lot right. Since the pandemic started. And I think that fear that a lot of people had with some of their assets being tied up in those paper assets, they wanted something a little bit more tangible. Like real assets, like real estate and precious metals. Now actually I wanted to ask you about that too. If you were to compare precious metals to, let's say, like real estate, what are some of the benefits that make precious metals a safer or better investment to someone instead of like maybe purchasing a single family home for renting?

Patrick Yip:
18:25

Yeah, I would say they both have their benefits. I like real estate as well. The nice part about it, just like precious metals, you can't hack it away. No one can really easily steal it because it's, it exists, it's there. You can't just take it away. Just like.

Average Joe Finances:
18:37

Maybe a mobile home.

Patrick Yip:
18:38

Oh. Yeah, hopefully that doesn't happen. But I they both have their benefits. But the nice thing about precious metals in many cases too, is it's not leveraged a lot of times with leverage, with real estate. It could work both ways. Obviously, if the house goes up, then hey you amplify your gains. If for whatever reason your, let's say your tenant doesn't pay or you can't pay, then obviously leverage is not great. Soon your house goes back to the bank. But with precious metals, lot of it too is people don't use leverage for it. They own it outright. Like I said, it's tangible, like real estate. You can't hack it away. It's just, it's something nice, especially in times of uncertainty, especially when the government is printing so much money these days that you're like what is my dollar worth or my dollar's only worth what someone is willing to pay for and who knows? I could imagine in the next several years there's gonna be a lot more dollars printed, a lot more crazy policies that, that are, is gonna basically devalue the dollar. And by then you want to have something that is, is hard, that can't be printed such as gold, such as real estate. You can't just click a button and houses appear. I wish that were the case, you can't. They require effort to build a house. It requires effort to mine gold.

Average Joe Finances:
19:41

Yeah. Okay. Very good points. Definitely some good pros and cons of each. I do like what you pointed out though the how with real estate, usually it's leverage, right? You have a loan, you have a mortgage out on it. Yep. And people buying precious metals are actually, physically purchasing that. And it's not like there's a loan on it or anything. It's yours. Once you buy it, it's yours, a hundred percent. So yeah. That's fantastic. A lot of stuff to think about here. Especially with the way that the economy's been going with, they won't say it, we're in a pretty bad spot, but nobody's gonna come out and say it. But, just keep an eye on what's going on. Inflation being, over eight, 9%. The, these past couple months has been pretty eye-opening, I think, for a lot of people. And at the same time, it's also been I guess eye-opening is the best word, but I think it's helping people realize that cash in the bank is doing them no good. It's no justice. So if you are still working on paying off all of your debt and you're trying to figure out, once you've got it paid off, what are you gonna do with your money? Here's something else for you to consider. Maybe take a look at precious metals, if that's something, if you wanna be more conservative and state with something that's very safe, This seems like a very safe commodity to own. And actually can you talk about that a little bit, Patrick? Like why would be like, buying precious metals, be safer than say buying individual stocks?

Patrick Yip:
20:53

Yeah, so I'd like to, I'm a data guy, as you could probably tell. I'm quoting a lot of stats here and there.

Average Joe Finances:
20:57

I know, I love it.

Patrick Yip:
20:58

To me it's It's better to actually look at history than for me to make an assumption and say, Hey, this is my opinion. So I actually did an analysis looking at the past 50 years of data. So this is from 1970 up until today. And I said what's the best portfolio return? Or what's the best, easy to do portfolio return without getting into individual stocks and so on like that. A lot of times investors or financial planners would say, Hey, you should do stocks and bonds. And the thought there is you do stocks if you wanna be aggressive and you're okay with little volatility, you do bonds if you wanna be a little more conservative, little less volatility. So I looked at the past 50 years, as I mentioned, looking at 10 year average return. So I don't want to penalize stocks in 2008, nor do I want to pen like reward gold in 2011. It's just one time spikes. I wanna normalize that. So I'm looking at a 10 year holding period. It's actually possible to. The return of almost a hundred percent stock portfolio with less volatility than a bond portfolio by having an asset allocation to gold. And the numbers are actually as the following. So it's 80% S&P, 20% gold, and the numbers, and these are real returns too. So the stock portfolio, a hundred percent stock portfolio would return 7% real returns. So this is after inflation. 5% standard deviation. So the standard deviation is what I call how well you could sleep at night. Obviously you don't want a portfolio that's gonna be going up 50% in the next day, going down 50%, and you're gonna stress yourself out, right? So that's the stock portfolio. The hundred percent bond portfolio is a 5% annual return, so 2% lower than the stock portfolio and a 3% standard deviation. So also 2% lower in the standard deviation side. If you go to that 80% S&P portfolio, 20% gold portfolio. The annual return is 6.7%, so 0.3%, 30 basis points less in the stock portfolio, but your standard deviation is now 2.7%, so much lower than that, a hundred percent bond portfolio. So if you want, if you're an investor, you have an asset allocation. I would suggest maybe you, you look at replacing some of your bond allocation is too gold. Obviously everyone's portfolio is gonna be different if you're 30 years old or you're 80 years old, obviously do what's right for you. So that's just what data's showing.

Average Joe Finances:
22:59

Yeah, no I appreciate the numbers, right? Because it helps everybody make sense of it all right? When you sit down and think about it. So I'm sitting I'm writing this down as you're going. That's pretty significant when you look at the bonds versus precious metals, right? If you're trying to be well diversified, a lot of people always tell you do stocks and bonds. Not just, being the stock market and index funds and everything else really diversify and put your money in different areas. Now, by doing the 80 20, A 0.3% change in that deviation may not seem like much, but over a 10 year period, like you said, that's huge. That's a lot of money. So I think, It's something that people should consider for sure. Alright, Patrick, I want to transition this into something that I call the final round. It's where I'm gonna ask you the same four questions that I ask everybody that comes on this show, and it's gonna help us get a good idea of how you are when you have to deal with being under pressure or put in a tough situation. So if you're ready to go, we will get that party started.

Patrick Yip:
23:51

Let's do it.

Average Joe Finances:
23:51

All right, Patrick, awesome man. This has been really fun. Thank you so much. All right, so first question I have for you. What's the biggest mistake you've ever made in investing?

Patrick Yip:
24:02

Yeah, so the biggest mistake I've made was not taking control of my own financial future. Little story back in 2008, I had a portfolio, typical portfolio stocks and bonds, 60% stocks, 40% bonds. I was like, okay I'm good like this. This is what all the financial planners said. So what, 2008 the financial crisis hit, and I saw what my portfolio got. Get chopped in half, now I look back and said, it was a good lesson. I joke now that the 401k became with 201k, wasn't funny back then, . I could tell you're certainly losing 50%, but it's not a fun thing. And it's actually interesting to note that you look today and 2022, both stocks and bonds are down so that diversification is not working this year. Fast forward to today, I'm managing my own money. With the current investment climate, I'm actually more excited about the upcoming years than I have in the past couple years. And there's a saying that says, fortunes are made during recessions, or there's more millionaires made during recessions than any other time. So I've positioned myself in what I believe is gonna be the right way to position myself in the next couple years, and I'm excited.

Average Joe Finances:
24:58

All right. Fantastic. Yeah, I appreciate that and I appreciate the transparency too. 2008 was a hard time for a lot of people. But to have your actual portfolio get cut in half, that's. Yeah. I'm glad you're, that you that you're you stuck it out and did something else and made it work, man, because a lot of people that lost their shirt there, they're still to this day struggling to, to bounce back from that, yep. Because they decided to sell and not hold on. Alright. Cool. Next question I have for you, Patrick, and this kind of ties into that last question, but what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first got started?

Patrick Yip:
25:29

Yeah, I wish I learned to pursue my passion sooner. It's one of those things like my passion, as you could tell from this interview. I like numbers, I like investments, I like precious medals. Hopefully that comes out in the interview. You could probably tell, but I enjoy reading about investments. I enjoy listening to investment podcasts during my evenings, during my free time. And I've been with apmex as I mentioned earlier, for 11 years. And I could say it's probably the first company that I worked for that I really enjoy being at.

Average Joe Finances:
25:54

All right. Fantastic. If you are working in a career field or at a job that, that you really enjoy, that's one of those things it's like, can you really call it work? Yeah. If you're really enjoying what you're doing most people when they talk about work, it's oh, I got to go to work, and they're miserable. Yeah. But you get fired up when you're talking about what you do, man, and I think it's awesome. You have a real passion for what you do with APMEX and One Gold. So that's awesome, man. Okay, next question again, Patrick ties into the last couple, but do you have any tips, tricks that you would recommend to someone that is just getting started today? So let's say it's somebody that just paid off their consumer debt, right? And they wanna start investing their money. What would you tell that person today?

Patrick Yip:
26:31

Yeah. To go off my last answer too, I would say find your passion and pursue something in that passion. So I think that'll allow you to have that competitive advantage over your peers. So we talked about real estate earlier. So let's say you like real estate and you look at real estate in your evenings and in your weekends and every week you're spending north of a hundred hours just on your free time looking into real estate just because you love it. And then your peer, on the other hand, is just into real estate just for a job. So he or she spends 30, 40 hours in real estate, just does it, doesn't really have a passion for it. Fast forward a couple years later. You're gonna have spent so much more time in real estate than your peer that your peer can't even see you, can't even keep up, can't even compete with you. So I would say find your passion and do what you love and you're gonna have a competitive advantage over other people.

Average Joe Finances:
27:14

I love that, Patrick. Do what you love. Do what you love. All right, cool. All right. And the next question is not tied to any of those other ones. This is just more of an opinion-based question, but do you have a favorite business investing or real estate related book or podcast, or, both?

Patrick Yip:
27:30

Yeah, so for podcasts, I enjoy listening to Rick Rule. So Rick Rule is actually, if you don't know of him, he's one of the most well known and legendary resource investors. So he invests in a lot of mining stocks and so on that. He doesn't have a channel on his own, but he regularly does appear on several YouTube channels. So I like following him. One of the most impactful books, I think is actually called The Secret. When I first read it too, I thought there was no way that law of attraction could work. And it's basically, ways you could basically envision your way to get rich. But however, the more I live my life, the more I've realized that positive energy, positive thinking could basically make me achieve anything I want.

Average Joe Finances:
28:06

Oh, I love that. So the book, you said it was called The Secret? Yeah. It's a Secret by Rhonda Byrne. Okay. Awesome. I'm gonna add that one to the list. That's fantastic. And I'm gonna look out for Rick Rule and see if I can find him on any podcasts. It sounds very interesting definitely appreciate that. Okay, so that is it for the final round, Patrick. However, I do have one more question for you. And this question is the most important question of all because people are sitting here listening to this interview and saying, man, I really like what Patrick's talking about. I haven't really considered precious metals before, but maybe this is something I should consider adding to my portfolio. So we wanna know more. So where can people find more information about you? APMEX, One Gold. Do you have a website you could share with us? Any social media profiles anybody can follow or anything like that?

Patrick Yip:
28:47

Yeah, so I would first definitely recommend that everyone check out precious metals. Definitely put a portion of your assets to a precious metals. If you like the physical side, check apmex.com that's APMEX.com. That's where you could buy any of the physical metals for delivery to your house. If you like the vaulted solution, check out one gold.com. That's ONEGOLD.com. Actually as a special offer for listeners, I do have two coupon codes on One Gold. That'll give you a little discount. So the first one is Gold50OFF,, that's G O L D five zero O F F. That's 50% off the premiums or the markup on US Gold. And then the second coupon is Silver50OFF. 50% off the premiums for us silver. And if you have any questions or wanna reach out to me directly, feel free to email me. I'm at patrick.yip@apmex.com. That's patrick.yip@apmex.com.

Average Joe Finances:
29:38

All right. Fantastic. Patrick, thank you so much. I'm gonna make sure I have those links in the show notes to make it easy for everybody to go and copy and paste or click away. Just don't do it while you're driving. And also those coupon codes, thank you so much for sharing that with our listeners. That's fantastic, man. This has been really a treat. It's always great to learn a bit, a little bit more about precious metals. I've had a couple people on, we talked about this before we recorded, I've had a couple people on that mine, precious metals but never really had too many people that, that talk about like actually dealing and and working with precious metals in that aspect. So this was a real treat. And I feel like I wanna go buy some coins now after having this conversation with you. But hey, thanks so much man. I really appreciate you coming.

Patrick Yip:
30:15

Great. Thanks for having me on Mike.

Average Joe Finances:
30:16

Absolutely. And hey, to my listeners, thank you so much for joining me and our special guest, Patrick Yip on the Average Joe Finances Podcast. Go leave us a five star review and tell us what you liked about today's episode with Patrick. Aloha from Hawaii and have a .Great rest of your day.