Hello and welcome to At Barron's.

I'm Kristen Bellstrom, Barron's managing editor, filling in for Andy Serwer today.

And welcome to our guest, Penny Pennington, managing partner of Edward Jones.

Good morning.

Hi Penny, it's so nice to see you.

Great to see you again.

So I want to start by talking a little bit about the scale of Edward Jones.

You have, I believe, something like 8 million clients.

So that gives you a pretty unique view into what Americans are thinking about the economy, the markets, their own financial situation.

So what are you hearing right now? What is top of mind for your clients? Well, we are North America's

advisors. So nearly 20,000 financial advisors in the United States and Canada. We have a client in every

county but one in the United States and a brick and mortar location in two-thirds of the counties,

a trillion eight of assets under care, depending

on what's going on with the market that day.

So the way you describe it, Kristen, is exactly right.

We are hyper-local, our reach is vast, we're North America's advisor.

And so we really do believe that we have the pulse on what's in the hearts in the minds of our clients of North

American investors. Well, what they're thinking about and talking about is their families.

They're talking about the health of their families and thinking about passing their wealth

to their families multigenerationally. More currently, they're thinking about passing their wealth to their families multi-generational. More currently,

they're thinking about prices and inflation and jobs and how they think about geopolitical,

geopolitical situations that are causing a lot of volatility. Fundamentally, no matter what's going on in the world,

...