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Welcome to the Systematic Investor Series.

Welcome and welcome back to this week's edition of the Systematic Investor series with Mark Rezsabtsinski and I, Neil's Castle, Larsen,

where each week we take the pulse of the global markets through the lens of a rules-based investor.

Mark, wonderful to be back with you this week. How are you doing?

Good. I haven't talked to you since last year, so happy New Year, but we're already a month

into the year, surprisingly. Yeah, we are indeed, actually. We're recording on the first of February,

and as people who have followed the last couple of weeks episode, I'm actually recording this from a hotel room in Miami since we have been attending the big conference week for our industry over here.

So we got to, I mean, you provided some really, really interesting topic,

so I appreciate that. But before we go into any of that, of course, I'm always curious,

kind of what's been on your radar on the first month of the year, anything in particular

that caught your interest? Well, what caught me my interest was what happened yesterday with the Fed.

We always are focused on Fed, and it's not so much the announcement,

but it's Jay Powell's press conference.

And what we learned is that they are data-driven,

which has been known for a long time, and we will lower rates when the data tells us to.

And then people ask, of course, well, what does the data have to tell you to lower rates?

We'll say, we'll see.

So this is the classic issue that we're facing right now with the Fed is that they say,

we're going to look at data.

We're going to tell you that there are some data we're going to look at, but we're not going

to tell you how we're going to interpret that data until after the fact, which is frustrating

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