Money Game?

Talking Real Money - Investing Talk

Don McDonald

Education, Business, Investing, How To

4.5 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2026

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A chaotic but revealing game-show-style opening leads into a sharp lesson on why market trivia doesn’t matter nearly as much as discipline. Tom and Don walk through eye-opening 2025 market stats, including the real impact of the Magnificent Seven, international stocks’ outperformance, and a surprising Bitcoin result, before pivoting to listener calls on risk aversion in retirement, tax drag in fixed income, ETF vs. mutual fund structure, pensions as “bond substitutes,” and the fear of poorly timed rollovers. The episode reinforces a consistent theme: markets anticipate, investors overthink, and long-term success comes from diversification, cost control, and building portfolios around real human behavior—not headlines. 0:04 Cold open and chaotic “What Do You Know?” game show setup 1:58 S&P 500 return vs. performance without the Magnificent Seven 5:16 Magnificent Seven’s staggering 10-year return 5:48 International stocks outperform U.S. stocks in 2025 7:35 Retired caller weighs SGOV vs. VTEB and tax efficiency 10:01 Risk aversion, inflation fears, and when bonds actually belong 13:11 CD ladders as a stability alternative to bond funds 14:27 Clean energy ETFs rise despite negative policy headlines 16:41 Colombia emerges as best-performing global stock market 18:02 Bitcoin’s surprising full-year decline in 2025 19:02 Why none of this market trivia actually matters 20:28 ETFs vs. mutual funds explained simply and clearly 24:44 Why fund companies resist ETF conversions 27:13 Pension income vs. bonds in portfolio construction 31:20 AI voice experiment and margin rate reality check 32:02 Fear of rolling over 401(k)s and “hodgepodge-itis” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your latest project.
0:03.0	It's heavy with information, data and exactly 36 pages of waffle.
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0:13.0	an AI-powered workspace that turns documents into summaries and insights
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0:22.8	work smarter and save time. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more and try it out on Adobe.com.
0:34.9	Reality Radio for a really great future.
0:38.0	We're talking real money.
0:40.3	Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, but I hate to inform you that we're going to have to interrupt this edition of Talking Real Money for a special presentation.
0:55.9	Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to what do you know, featuring your host, Tom Cog.
1:07.3	I'm trying to figure out what the heck's going on.
1:10.4	I played music. Oh, okay. As an interlude? Is it the break? Is it tired of the talking thing? No, it was a game show introduction. You know, for some reason, you, it goes fine over the air, but it doesn't come through to you for some reason. Yeah, okay. Well, you always sound great. Yeah, I always sound great. Whether I can sound. Anyway, so. By the way, it's great to do the show with the great pumpkin. I mean, I'm looking across it. This is giant orange. Oh, okay. This is, look, this is my cell phone orange. Ah, okay. Part of me. There's a football game today. Oh, okay. Not the one that you're thinking of, Seattle people. Seattle is crazy right now. I care very little about yours. You should start caring more because the locals love it. I know, I know. I'm watching the game that goes before that game. Yeah, I know.
2:01.1	Anyway.
2:01.6	We're sorry to interrupt that by half an hour for you, but we'll hurry as fast as you can.
2:05.0	I was welcoming you to our pre-entry game show.
2:09.8	Okay.
2:10.3	What do you know?
2:11.7	What do you know?
2:13.6	What do you know?
2:14.8	Tom is going to ask you a series of questions that are going to test your knowledge of the markets and money.
2:24.7	And tell them what they've won, Don.
2:28.1	You've won almost nothing.
	...

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