Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on our webinar. We are super excited to be here, and we're excited to be here 'cause it's always fun to engage with you. But there's an opportunity in the markets that we wanted to talk to you about today, and simply put, yields are back. I'll start with a quick overview of the team and what we're all about. I'll offer a few perspectives on today's market and what created this market opportunity. I'll turn it over to Keith, and Keith will cover a few actionable strategies to consider for today's market. We'll finish with some actionable takeaways, as we close out today's webinar. As always, if you have questions, please jump in. We see them through the chat and we'll get to as many of those as we can. First of all, I think I've met a lot of you, certainly, over a Zoom or a webinar. My name is Christian Chan, I'm the CIO of AssetMark. I've been running investment portfolios for institutions and individuals for about 25 years, and I'm really excited to work with this team here at AssetMark. A lot of you have met these people, particularly the folks on the left-hand side of the screen. We have Gary Zylstra, we have Faith, we have John. I'm very excited to have these folks in the team, and in the field with you. When I think about how to best engage our team and the expertise we have on our team, it's this list of people that we have here on the left, the investment solutions professionals. Here on the right, there's myself, and we have the portfolio management and research staff. I think you've met many of these people over the years, but it is a very well tenured, very experienced, very successful investment team. You can see both myself and Keith here on this slide. This team manages several strategies. We have a lot of brands within the marketplace. These brands are organized based on both client segmentation as well as the delivery mechanism. If you're looking for individual securities versus mutual funds, a variety of different client segmentation and packaging options for you to choose from. All right, let's kind of get into it. I'll start with a few perspectives. The first key takeaway I have from today's market is, I think we have to acknowledge that there's been a ton of pain within the equity and the fixed income markets. We feel it, you feel it, your clients feel it. If there's a silver lining in all of this terrible return and I think volatility that we've seen, it's that they have created, and we are seeing, the best yield to risk opportunity that we've seen in decades. Second key takeaway, simple strategies like buy and hold short-term Treasury ladders are really simple, really low risk, and today, and this is for the first time in a long time, offer really attractive yields. The last takeaway, this is a great opportunity to get clients unstuck. When I think about the convergence between what the markets are offering from a return perspective, what our clients need from us as both advisors and investment managers, and a demonstrated track record and demonstrated capability, this all comes together in this fantastic opportunity that we're going to talk to you about today. All right. Just to back up for a minute. Again, here are those terrible returns that we've seen on a year-to-date basis. A lot of negative return for bond markets. A lot of different ramifications, certainly for 60/40 types of investors. The only asset class within major bond categories that have produced positive returns, the short-term Treasury. It's not an exotic kind of strategy. It's certainly not the sexiest asset class in the world, but they've produced really good returns in a really, really challenging market. Before I get into the opportunity that we have within short-term bonds, I wanted to walk through the life of a 10-year Treasury bond that was issued 10 years ago today, so in 2012. Bonds, particularly Treasuries, are issued at par. They're issued at $100. What can happen is, depending on what happens to yields in the markets, you can get a temporary price decline in the price of a bond. But as that bond goes further and further towards maturity within this 10-year life cycle, it gets closer and closer to its original $100 value. At the end of this 10-year period, the price return on the bond is 0%. Now, all this while, of course, you're getting coupon income. What happens is every six months, you get coupons coming in from this Treasury bond, and over the course of a 10-year period, this particular bond returned 16% cumulative over that 10-year period. Now, there are kind of two key takeaways from my perspective on the simple life of a bond. The first is that price return long-term will trend toward zero. This is the same for all Treasuries because they don't have the default risk. You'll start at $100, you'll end at $100. The second thing is that yield is the main component, really the only component for a Treasury bond if you hold it for the entirety of its term structure. In this case, 16%. With that in mind, I want to step back and look at long-term returns and long-term risk for various asset classes within the bond universe. First thing I would point out, and this is about over a 25-year time period, we're looking at total return on the vertical axis, and then we're looking at maximum drawdown as our measure of risk in these bond categories. I'll first turn our attention to this portion here, the high yield bond area. As we know, really good returns, about 6.7% average annual returns, over the last 25, 30 years. With that comes a pretty extreme drawdown risk, a maximum drawdown of -33% during this time period. Second thing we're gonna look at here is the other end of the spectrum, short-term Treasuries. As you can see, you're getting decent yields, above 2% yields, but the maximum drawdown on short-term Treasuries is less than 1 percentage point. A massive difference. As I think about this chart here on the left, what really strikes me is that when you look at that trend line between or the relationship between long-term risk and long-term drawdown, it's basically a linear line, right? There's no weird kinks in this curve. It's a linear relationship between long-term expected returns and then long-term drawdown. Next thing we want to look at is the opportunity that we see in the marketplace today. The first thing that really jumps out to me on the right here is that trend line, right? It's the same as it is on the As it is on the left-hand side of the page, but two dots really jumped out at you. The first dot is the high yield dot, yielding over 9% for high yield bonds. But of course, as we saw from the previous slide or the previous chart, there's that maximum drawdown potential of high yield bonds of -33%. Now we look at the next dot that's off of the line, the short-term Treasuries yielding about 4.3-4.4% today with that maximum drawdown of less than one percentage point. So that's why we say that in today's market we're seeing an unusual risk return opportunity that we haven't seen in a long time. When I think about the big picture, over 4% yields with really minimum drawdown risk is something we haven't seen in a really long time. We're excited about that in terms of this potential strategy. Here we're just gonna finish up with the markets piece, and we're showing year-over-year yields that we've seen in the market. One year ago, in the dark blue. In the light blue line, we have yields as of the end of last month. We're definitely seeing increased yields within the marketplace. Now, I know we all understand that higher yields over the last year are a function of, or caused by, these lower prices that we've seen. I think from my perspective, the main thing to look at is today we have much better yields in the marketplace. You can see the big difference between the dark blue lines or dark blue bars and the light blue bars. The other thing is, when you look at where those big gaps are, what types of risks are you associating that yield increase in yield with? Again, from our perspective, that first set of columns there, that short-term Treasury yield, those are the most attractive risk-return ratios that we're seeing in the marketplace today. I'll go ahead and turn it over to Keith now, who will talk about some strategies to consider. All right. Thank you, Christian. I wanted to start you off with talking about those short-term strategies and really how they're structured. It's a simple, straightforward approach where we're holding high quality individual bond. Not only high quality, the highest quality individual bonds, where we're looking at U.S. Treasury and government agency securities. It's not unlike an ETF or a mutual fund. Those typically lend themselves very well when you're gonna take some credit exposure, and there's the chance that an individual bond might default. There, with an ETF or a mutual fund, you may spread across hundreds of individual bonds, and so one default won't really impact the portfolio. When you're talking about U.S. Treasury and federal government agency securities, that removes a lot of that risk of default because you're backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Again, this is just one that lends itself for the individual investor to own those underlying individual bonds. I'll talk about the structure in just a moment. This is a passive approach where investors are taking the targeted maturities. The reason this is called a ladder, just think of it as short-term bond strategy. The ladder is, just means that you're buying equally weighted positions along the curve. If you've got a standard Treasury ladder, it's one year through five year with one maturity coming off each year, maturing at par. If you've got a short-term Treasury ladder, that's where you have a maturity maturing at par at the end of each quarter. That goes out 15 months. It's a very short time period. We had a couple of questions come in, and I did want to address those during these slides. Robert asked, "Is now a good time to put dry powder to work in bonds?" The short answer is yes. Typically, you're talking about dry powder, you're talking about money in a bank account, say. The bank accounts are yielding what? Maybe 2.5%-3% at best, probably somewhere considerably below that. With these 4%+ yields, you're getting a much better bang for your buck, better risk-adjusted opportunity within the market space. With Marilyn, she asked, "What is the best strategy for bringing new money in?" This is one of those strategies that's really resonating with investors. There's been a lot of volatility in the market year to date, particularly with regard to these investors' equity portfolios. To have this rock in their portfolio that, again, matures at par, you know exactly what you're gonna get from this strategy. At least with the initial five bonds, you can get an estimate at that yield to maturity. With those first five bonds, you know exactly where that's gonna be because they're maturing at par. We'll talk about what happens with the interest rate changes in a moment. Current yields above 4% for these short-term strategies, it helps clients meet a lot of different needs, again, with bringing those cash online or even for specific investments that they're planning to make. Let's say you've got an investor that's looking at the housing market, and things are getting a little bit rocky there with these higher interest rates. That means there's gonna be buying opportunities ahead as things get a little bit dicier in the housing market. If they wanted to put some money aside and buy in 15 months, you could implement this short-term Treasury strategy, and that would allow them to freeze trading. There's this flexible implementation that allows freezing of trading, and with that, all that means is that when those bonds mature at the end of each quarter at par, that just remains in cash instead of getting reinvested out at 15 months from the time of that maturity. Again, there's a lot of flexibility in these strategies. It's designed to be that core part of an investor's portfolio. Turning to how the Savos bond ladders are structured, you can see that it provides a steady income stream, and the way that it does that is by building these equal weights along those five different positions. These will be targeted maturities. This one in particular that we're looking at on the right here is the short-term Treasury bond ladder. You can see the longest maturity is out, the number five there is the 15-month Treasury, and the number one is the three month Treasury. At the end of each quarter, you've got a bond maturing at par, and at that point, if you freeze trading, that just remains in cash. If you don't freeze trading, what that does is that rolls out to that number five space and buys a new 15-month maturity. Each quarter you've got new, Each level of this bond is coming to a maturity. It just provides an easy, straightforward approach for investors to understand. With that, we've got another question that came in, too, as well, which asks, Steve asks us to explain how Treasuries pay coupons. Christian mentioned this earlier, but they're semiannual payments from these coupons. In addition to that, when you look at that short-term bond ladder on the right, you can see that you have bonds maturing at the end of each quarter. Now, with the way that interest rates have been lower for the past, say, 10 years or 15 years and now have moved higher, typically these bonds are bought at a discount. That just means they were bought at a price below par generally. When they come up and mature at par, you're having a bond that's generating a capital gain that still shows as income. That generates another way to have income, but you've got bonds maturing in cash at the end of each quarter. With that, let's turn to the next slide. We can talk about what happens to these bond ladders when the yields change. As I mentioned, when an investor first invests in the initial five bonds, you can get a yield to maturity that gives you an estimate of what those five bonds will yield over that time period. As interest rates change and bonds mature at par, they will be rolling over into this new interest rate environment. The thing that's really attractive to people is that because the bonds are held to maturity and the changes in these interest rates have no impact on the initial positions. Now, what if interest rate environment, what if it moves higher? Well, the bond prices you can see on the left, the bond prices do move lower, but again, you're maturing at par, so that's not gonna impact the individual portfolio in any way. As that bond matures, if we're looking at short-term Treasury ladder at the end of the quarter, you're gonna have that roll out 15 months and have a higher yield to buy into. Your investor's yield to maturity will trend higher as those individual five bonds mature and get reinvested at the new higher interest rates. With that, we have another question that came in that asked. Ari asked, "What's the trajectory of rates and what happens when easing will be needed?" Right now we expect interest rates to move higher, especially the fed funds rate at the short end, but the terminal rate may peak around 5%, at least for the fed funds, right? That's been built into the fed funds futures market. We're taking that from where the market expects the Fed to go from here. Now, at that point, if the economy is faltering in some ways and the Fed needs to come in, that will mean that there's lower economic growth and the potential for a recession. That risk is there. If interest rate environment moves lower, that means that those bond prices will move higher, as you can see on the right, and the individual investor will be able to reinvest the larger coupon of that bond when that bond matures, but those lower yields will eventually get incorporated into the bond ladder. Now, one thing to keep in mind as well, that if we're in a lower rate environment and the Fed is coming in to provide liquidity to the markets, that also might be a nice time to let some of those bonds mature and move a little bit more into the equity market. It could be an advantageous time. That's just how the bond ladders work with the changes in interest rates. With that, let's move to slide 30 and talk about some of the individual Savos bond strategies and structures. We had another question that came in. Steven asked, "What's the optimal bond portfolio maturity in the current rate environment?" Here's where Christian was focusing on that short-term Treasury ladder. You can see that the yield is currently four point five percent. I think it's a little bit lower, four point four percent right now, but that's for just one half of a year of duration. That risk return opportunity is much more attractive at the short end of the curve. If we think back to Ari's question about whether there's some risk that the interest rates may move lower if growth slows too much, then you may have a situation where you've got an investor where you'd rather lock into that standard Treasury ladder that goes out one through five years, and that way they have access to those higher interest rates and the decline in interest rates will have less of an impact on the income generated over that five year period. There's a couple of different options, but the best risk-return right now is that short-term Treasury ladder. It's been really effective with clients. We also have the agencies, we have the TIPS with the inflation protection as well, should that reaccelerate. We also wanted to talk to you about some active strategies. With those Savos, and by the way, the pricing that is there on the sheet as well with 20 basis points, which is important to keep in mind. With the active strategy, we can see that the Savos fixed income high yield strategy focuses purely on that high yield space, and they only implement that through ETFs. You do have that diversification across hundreds of individual bonds. An individual default has much lower impact on these bonds. And as Christian also mentioned earlier, you've got yields up above 9% within that space. Looking back historically, that's been a very attractive entry point for long-term investors. Even if there is a little bit more volatility here, that tends to be a yield where it benefits investors to take some high yield exposure. Looking at the core investment, intermediate duration, you can see that's yielding 5.7%, so very attractive for that 4.5-year duration. Then with the municipals, you can see that's got a six year duration, hence yielding about 5%. Now, keep this in mind. If you've got an investor in the highest tax bracket of 37%, that tax-equivalent yield is 6.9%, so a very attractive entry point for those higher tax bracket investors for municipals. Turning to the ideas for constructing portfolios. The one that we're focused on the most here is that top strategy, because you've got that 4.5% for just investing in five individual Treasuries that have a duration of just half a year, and you're reinvesting along that Treasury ladder going out 15 months and just letting those roll down and mature at par. That's for conservative investors, and that provides a nice balance for the volatility that's happening in the equity market. If you've got an investor that's willing to take a little bit more intermediate corporate bond exposure, you could combine the short-term Treasury ladder at 60% with 40% of the intermediate duration, and that brings the estimated yield on the portfolio up to 5%. It's a little bit more attractive for those investors that are thinking about their long-term treasury, long-term fixed income allocation. For yield-seeking investors, we have one more opportunity here where you could do 50% in the short-term treasury ladders, 20% in the intermediate duration, and then you have 30% exposure to that dedicated high yield. By doing so, you raise that estimated portfolio yield to 6.2%. Now, as Christian pointed out, we haven't seen yields like this, especially with the one-year treasury, since the summer of 2007. Thinking back, that was when the first iPhone was introduced to the world. These yields are a really attractive opportunity, and we think the time is perfect for these. With that, I'm gonna pass it back to Christian to talk about some of the actionable takeaways. Great. Thank you very much, Keith. Great summary of some really compelling strategies for today's markets. I'll really just conclude with three summary bullet points that we think are really exciting in the markets today. First of all, yes, we've seen some pain in the markets. I think we all acknowledge that. We all understand and feel with you how difficult that's been. On the flip side, we have an amazing yield to risk opportunity in the marketplace that we haven't seen in decades, right? I'm very excited about that. These buy and hold short-term Treasury ladders are really simple, they're low risk, and they offer really good yields at this point in time right now. The last thing is, as I mentioned earlier, this is a great convergence between market opportunity, what clients are looking for, and a demonstrated capability. I think all of that, you know, comes together for what we think is a great opportunity for you to engage your clients, to help them get unstuck. We talked to a lot of advisors about how hard it is to get clients re-engaged with the markets because they've seen losses in both their equity and their bond portfolios. 4.5% yields with minimal downside risk, to me, is a great way to start that conversation to get clients unstuck and back invested and back thinking about generating returns. Hey, Christian, we had a question come in. Do you mind if I ask you, here's the question that came in: What are some of the key market indicators you would look for to cause you to move clients that are currently in Savos short duration to longer term fixed income? Yeah, great question, and I think he talked about some of the alternative strategies that you can use to supplement with this type of short-term strategies. When I look at the yield curve today, we have a pretty large inversion. Today, the one year yield is about 4.6%, and the 10 year point on the curve is about 3.8%. You're getting a much higher yield pickup in the market today at the one year point than you are at the 10 year point. Now, when we start to get a positive slope within the yield curve, and you're starting to make money or starting to get incrementally paid on taking duration risk, that's the time when we'll start to think about inching out on the curve. I think that's a really critical point, is that these short-term Treasury ladders offer really good risk-return ratio opportunities today, but this is not gonna be around forever. We think you have about a year or so to get in on this opportunity and lock in some really good yields for a you know relatively short period of time. Again, we think this is a great opportunity to engage clients, and then you have a year to see how the markets play out and get them comfortable with a longer-term investment strategy. From my perspective, you know, this yield opportunity is really too good to pass up because we have so many clients that are asking us how we think about longer term investments and how we can get people back engaged in the markets. When I think about the long end of the curve, yes, we'll need to see that come up above the short end of the curve before we start thinking about inching clients out on the duration perspective. A couple of other things that we also think about in terms of factors, and this gets back to the root cause of why long-term Treasury yields move. First of all, there's a real growth assumption baked into the Treasury curve, and then there's also an inflation assumption. What's nice is that we're starting to get inflation under control, and the more we do that, the more safe the long end of the Treasury curve will be. As that happens, and as growth hopefully stabilizes, and then we work through whatever potential recession issues we have, that's when we'll start thinking about moving from the short end of the curve into the intermediate and eventually perhaps into the long end of the curve. That's great. Thank you for summarizing, Christian. We had another question that came in that asked us about the flexibility of these short-term Treasury ladders. The question was, "As the bonds mature, can we collect the principal and interest in cash to provide income to clients?" That's absolutely the case. As I mentioned before, there's this flexibility to freeze trading, and if you do so, you can set it up so if you have the standard Treasury ladder that's set up one, two, three, four, five years at 20% each. Each year, one is gonna roll off and mature at par. Now, assuming you wanted to start moving a client. Let's say a client has gone in to move their cash out of the equity market and needs to start getting back in. You could freeze that account, and then that account, the maturing bond proceeds would remain in the account in cash, and then you could use that cash to invest as you see fit. The same is true with the 15-month Treasury, short-term Treasury ladder, where you could just freeze trading. As that bond matures at the end of each quarter, that would remain in the account in cash rather than being reinvested at a 15-month maturity at that time. There is the flexibility to keep the cash in terms of both the principal and the income that it's receiving. Great. Thank you, Keith. I see a couple more questions that have come in, and I'll talk about concern about U.S. Treasuries and a potential default. We definitely see the potential for not so much a default. There could be a technical default as we get a hit up against the debt ceiling and things of that nature. Those tend to be short-term disruptors to the bond markets and to the Treasury markets. We tend to work through those pretty quickly 'cause I think, you know, as Keith has emphasized several times, Treasuries will not default. You know, they'll continue to pay their coupons. There may be little blips here and there in terms of volatility and price, you know, price differences. As we've talked about, as bonds trend towards maturity, they trend towards their par values. That's what is so appealing of the short-term part of the curve, is that you're not really taking that much risk at the short end of the curve in terms of price volatility. The duration's about, what was it? 0.6, 0.7 years. You're not getting nearly as much interest rate price sensitivity as you are with a full 10-year type of, you know, instrument. I think that's a really good question. We think about it a lot from a macroeconomic perspective and kind of big picture perspective. I think that risk is minimized because of the very short-term nature of these strategies. All right. Christian, I'll answer one more that's come in as well. It was a question on slide 33, but I think they mean this strategy, the three ideas for constructing portfolios. Not necessarily good for someone taking distributions beyond the actual yield, right? That's probably true, but you could also, as I mentioned, with the freeze in trading, if you wanted to take a little extra of the principal out in addition to the yield, that could be done with one of these blended portfolios where you're looking at a portfolio with 60/40, say, with the intermediate duration. The Savos intermediate duration listed there in the center would continue to deliver that quarterly yield while the Savos laddered short-term Treasury strategy would continue to deliver this semi-annual yield. Then again, you've got the portfolio rolling over every quarter. You've got some bonds maturing. If you wanted to, at that time, you could take some of that cash and provide that to investors to draw down principal. I think that would still work for this strategy given the flexibility that you have with these ladders. Great. Thank you, Keith. I will flip us forward to just the last little bit of today's webinar. Please check your inbox tomorrow early in the morning. If you wanna have a cup of coffee and re-watch this webinar, we encourage you to do so. There'll be a link to a replay that will come in the email. There'll also be our latest economic outlook that will come, and then several pieces of information on the strategies that Keith discussed today. The last thing that I wanted to acknowledge, and this is for David. We, you know, he submitted a question. We did not forget about you. David is absolutely right in pointing out that the way the yield curve is segmented by the Treasury, you have bills, and then you have notes, and then you have bonds. The 10-year Treasury example, that is a 10-year note. Thank you very much for that clarification, David. The reason why we used bonds and not notes in that particular example, I know it's technically not correct, but notes today have a very different connotation in terms of structured notes and things of that nature. Wanted to make sure that we absolutely steered clear of those types of instruments for today's conversation because you know, unlike some of those strategies, these are Treasuries. They're very simple, they're very transparent, and they're extremely liquid. We wanted to make sure that we steered clear away from any connotation around that. Thank you for that clarification. With that, I just wanted to thank everyone for their participation today. We enjoy talking to you, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.