So I think the actual reports for Q4 will be important as they always are, but I think the forward guidance becomes even more important in this environment and not just whatever guidance they might provide on earnings per share so we can get a sense of whether the bar is still too high for 2023 hasn't come down enough maybe has been cut enough, but specifically profit margins and to your point the layoff situation.

I'm Chris Hill and that's Lizanne Saunders, the chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab, weighing in with her thoughts on what investors should be watching during the earnings season that just kicked off.

I caught up with her last week to get her thoughts on the market, valuation, risk tolerance, crypto, financial independence and a lot more, but I began the conversation by asking about her career path.

There are people who know early in life exactly what they want to do for a living, but Lizanne Saunders went to the University of Delaware and studied international relations, not exactly what you would expect to be the field of study for someone who ended up being one of the most influential market strategists in America.

So my first question was, back when you were in college, what was the plan?

I didn't have a plan and when you said there are people who know very early on in life exactly what they want to do and do it, I was decidedly not one of those people.

I really didn't know what I wanted to do. The international relations degree really was a double major in political science and economics.

That was the program of study my first, I think two and a half years until they developed the IR program and I knew that when setting up the double major because that represented the prerequisite.

So in more practical terms, that was the backdrop and I felt that that was just broad enough that it kept lots of different avenues open given I didn't know what I wanted to do.

The only thing I really knew I wanted to do was live and work in New York City. So when I got out of undergrad, I, my grandfather was still living in the city and I essentially just pounded the pavement got connected with a entry level headhunter and interviewed at numerous different firms across many industries and just happened to really connect with the people at swi gavatar and something spoke to me.

And so I took that job and went to graduate school at night, starting a year later.

And while I worked full time, they paid for it. So that made the decision easy.

And so I was there for 13 years and essentially been a Schwab since then. So to basically two companies in 37 years, which is not common on Wall Street.

Absolutely not common in general and particularly on Wall Street. What was it in those early days that really turned the investing light on for you and made you think, Oh, not only is this interesting to me, I think this is what I want to do.

But what's interesting about the answer to that question is, you know, in advance of the first interview I had was swi gavatar and then in between the second, the first and second interviews, I did research on the company on the founding partners, one of whom was the late great Marty's Y, which of course this was in 1986.

And then I was doing research then was going to the library on microfish, you know, literally scrolling the wheel through newspaper clippings. There was no Google, there was no internet. So it was a bit more of an arduous task at the time.

And he was fascinated by Marty, he was for lack of a better word, he was very much a guru at that time was incredibly well known, had started one of the earliest ever if not earliest hedge funds, which is still ongoing, even though he passed away a number of years ago, this white department of partnership and there was

the funds, he had the best selling investment newsletter at the time, and the avatar side was the institutional money management side, and that's the side I started on, but I was always fascinated by Marty's top down work, he created the book all ratio, he coined the phrase don't fight the Fed, he coined the phrase, a trend as your friend, he developed numerous breadth type models, there's this wide breadth thrust that technicians follow.

So even though I was ultimately managing money on the avatar side, I was always much more interested in the top down big picture 30,000 feet and when I left in 99 to join US Trust, which only several months later was acquired by Schwab, I was then quickly adopted by the parent company, as I like to say, and one of the things they wanted to do was create this position of chief investment strategist that had not existed at Schwab before, and they asked if I was interested, and that was my

foray from essentially the world of bottom up stock picking to top down macro economic and market analysis, and that was 23 years ago.

It's great that you were able to figure out pretty quickly what area of investing you were most interested in, and I want to stick with the Schwab part of this for just a second because I found this quote of yours from an interview you did a few years ago, where you said most strategies make short term predictions about the market, but that's not what we do.

We think investors need to figure out where they are on the risk spectrum, and then we help them customize their allocations from there.

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