Nate Hoskin, founder of Hoskin Capital, discusses his journey in growing his practice and servicing a younger clientele. He emphasizes the importance of asset allocation and a quantitative approach to investing. Nate highlights the role of modern portfolio theory in optimizing portfolios and the need for personalized investment strategies. He also stresses the value of financial planning and consistency in achieving financial independence. Nate addresses the lack of education in the financial advisor toolkit and the challenges in creating educational content.
In this episode , we chat with Nate Hoskin of Hoskin Capital about financial planning for millennials and Gen Z. Learn about his approach to investing, asset allocation, and education for younger investors.
Please enjoy our conversation with Nate Hoskin.
The Investipal Podcast is produced by www.investipal.co. Past guests include Peter Lazaroff, Douglas Boneparth, Jamie Hopkins, Tyrone Ross and many more.
Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/investipal | www.linkedin.com/in/cameronhowe/; Twitter: www.twitter.com/camhowe16 | www.twitter.com/investipal; Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@camhowe16 | www.tiktok.com/@investipal; or Instagram: www.instagram.com/investipal/
Find Nate Hoskin at:
www.instagram.com/networthnate/
00:00 Introduction and Background
00:58 Starting Hoskin Capital
02:27 Business Model and Investment Approach
04:13 Quantitative Approach to Investing
05:47 The Importance of Asset Allocation
08:35 Asset Allocation for Young Investors
10:07 Diversification and Tech Exposure
12:37 Modern Portfolio Theory and Personalization
14:13 Efficient Frontier and Risk-Return Tradeoff
18:20 The Role of Asset Allocation in Portfolio Returns
19:24 Value of Financial Planning and Consistency
24:51 Lack of Education in Financial Advisor Toolkit
25:45 Challenges in Creating Educational Content
Cameron Howe: Hi everyone, welcome back to the Investipal podcast. I am pleased to welcome Nate Hoskin onto our episode today. Nate is the founder of Hoskin Capital. I think what's most interesting, he's been able to grow a TikTok following, primarily focused around investing and financial planning geared towards millennials and Gen Z. Apart from that, Nate has grown a marketing agency as well to help provide his learnings to investment advisors and how they can end up servicing a younger clientele. Nate, bit of a long-winded intro, but you have a lot to say. I'm pleased to welcome you on today. How are you?
Nate Hoskin: I'm so good, Cam. Thanks so much for having me today.
Cameron Howe: You know, I think maybe a natural starting place, maybe you could give us a bit of a background on Hoskin Capital and how you've been able to grow your practice and service a younger clientele.
Nate Hoskin: Absolutely. So I started my firm when I was 22. I got my certified financial planner around the same time. And so I ended up in this weird place where I was one of the youngest people to ever receive the letters. So I was quite qualified, but how many people would trust a 22 year old to manage their money? And frankly, I didn't really want it from a lot of people. I really wanted to work with the people who are in my same shoes, who are really starting to figure out money. For many of them, they had just started making money or working hard for their money, but they hadn't really figured out how to make money work for them. And I couldn't figure out how to serve them while also working for a firm that expected someone to walk in with $250,000 just to have a meeting with me. So I went out on my own in the middle of COVID in 2020, and I launched Hoskin Capital, which with Henry's. Henry's are high earners, not rich yet. And so as I said, these are the people who are working hard for their money, but they haven't quite figured out how to make money work for them. And then most recently, back in September of 2023, I actually started a digital marketing agency with my really good friend Nick. We're both finance content creators, we're both CFPs. We've both had resounding success, me for growing my practice and him as a full-time influencer. And so now we're making what we've learned over the past three years available specifically to financial advisors to help them do what we do.
Cameron Howe: I think it's very interesting because to your point, the investment advisor space as a whole skews high net worth. Like you said, 250K, the conversations we see quite often are like a million dollars plus. So you're not really getting access to a financial professional until you're much later on in life. So I think what you're doing is actually very interesting. And have you had to... Obviously they skew typically higher net worth because they're taking a percentage of AUM. Is that the business model you operate off of?
Nate Hoskin: I started with that business model, but I very, very quickly changed off of it because at the end of the day, and I can rant about management fees forever, and I will do my best to not do that, but long story short, if you're working with someone who is in their 60s and 70s, the payoff is absolutely present where your ability to control the volatility of their portfolio, to produce really approachable income for them. That's worth your fee. Absolutely. For someone who's in their twenties and thirties, they are most likely best situated in a very passive investment. That might be in individual stocks, that might be in a more theory optimal strategy, like we're going to talk about today, or it might be in an index fund. But regardless, you're not going to add a whole bunch of value by managing their money slightly better. And the chances of you outperforming the indexes are very, very slim. And so instead, I focus on the financial planning. How can I coach them and teach them about money? And how can I give them the roadmap until they really need an investment manager to keep their money solid.
Cameron Howe: Okay, very interesting. So it's primarily focused in on the planning space. Do you help as well on the investment management space?
Nate Hoskin: I do. So yeah, I manage money for clients. I charge just a baseline annual fee for that service, regardless of how much they manage. And yeah, we take a very passive, simple approach, but we also really like to focus on what I would consider to be the most important parts of investment management, being volatility management, as well as asset allocation, rather than focusing on market timing or anything of that sort.
Cameron Howe: Yeah, I think, you know, the area that you and I, when we first got connected, really aligned on was the quantitative approach. Like my background as a quant, I know you did, I think, was it your first job out of school? It was primarily in that space as well.
Nate Hoskin: Yeah, so my first job out of school and my whole college career, I was data science and finance and quantitative analytics.
Cameron Howe: Yeah. And you know, like I remember sitting on the trading floor of my first job and like, you know, you're in the information flow. Like I was, you can't day trade there. They put restrictions in place, but a lot of it was what's the hottest stock. And it didn't take me until I left to focus a little bit more on like a holistic wealth strategy on like, to your point, like more index investing where it's like, I will put 80% of my portfolio into index strategy, an index fund or a few index funds. And that 20% is kind of my fun basket.
Nate Hoskin: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Howe: but thinking more of it in terms of like asset allocation and like portfolio optimization rather than betting on single stocks.
Nate Hoskin: And I actually had a very similar experience because I was at a shop where the goal was very much to day trade, even if that wasn't what we really should have been doing to actually hit our strategy goals, that was just how it went in practice. And so the goal was to be trading for the first three hours of the day, constantly. And then I moved into the more wealth management space and we were still kind of day trading.
Cameron Howe: Oh wow.
Nate Hoskin: which was really odd to me. Like I've never met a wealth manager who was placing trades every single morning except for my old boss. And so that was totally where I cut my teeth was in like, you have to trade, you have to move, you have to change your allocation. The whole time I was watching and reading and learning more about just quantitative finance in general, as well as practicing with my own portfolio and realizing that... The noise wasn't causing them to perform any better than I was in my more passive approaches.
Cameron Howe: Yeah. And remember doing a study at my old job on the frequency of just rebalancing and the marginal cost ongoing from a quarterly rebalance to like a weekly or a monthly rebalances is marginal. And then if you factor in like transaction, like trading costs within that, you end up losing out. So it's like taking that longer term approach. It's, it's like almost too good to be true. It's almost like too boring on like a set it and forget it portfolio. Like when we chat with people, they really think like, I have to be, okay, I'm gearing up for 2024. I'm gonna start investing now. And they think like, they're gonna sit down and watch the markets every single day and invest all this time to analyze like, what's going on when like, that ends up biting you in the ass.
Nate Hoskin: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Howe: And I think what's much more interesting is like taking that long-term approach where it's like very boring and you don't have to think about anything. You just have to think about like what you help with, like what is my investment goal and then how do I build a portfolio that aligns to that? And I can review it with Nate or with my spouse, you know, every quarter or like every six months.
Nate Hoskin: right? What do you do before you forget it? I think that's the most important part because it's easy to think, oh, investing is just easy. You just buy three investments and that's going to be your entire life. And it's like, well, those investments might be really overweight tech or they might be invested overseas, but most of investing just takes the global sphere and just says, all right, we're a global fund. It's like, well, okay, so am I 60% in Europe? Am I in Latin America? Do I actually wanna be invested in these places? And so understanding your asset allocation, really setting it up so that it's a really strong portfolio and then forgetting it, I think that's the step most people miss.
Cameron Howe: So, you know, like, you're still in your 20s, right? As am I. And, you know, with that, like maybe if there's some listeners, some viewers watching this right now, like what does a typical asset allocation look like for a mid, late 20 year old person, a Henry?
Nate Hoskin: I am, yeah.
Nate Hoskin: it's really heavy equities, less so now, which has changed drastically even since I have been working in the industry because we had zero interest rates for years and years and that has changed so significantly. So bonds are definitely back in style, but if you're in your 20s, I mean, yeah, we're looking at least 90% equities. And I will usually look at a like an 80-20 split when it comes to going overseas, the United States has still been the most defensible, most reliable market. And it doesn't seem like that is necessarily changing anytime soon, but I think that 20% is the most interesting piece, because a lot of advisors will just invest that like throwing grain to the birds and just saying, well, we'll do a little bit over here. We'll do a little bit over here and it'll be fine. We've taken a much more analytical approach to say what countries do we actually want to be in with that 20%.
Cameron Howe: Right. And when you think of it on that 80-20 split, is it I'm buying like the US, MSCI US index fund, or is it more granular and you are looking at like sectors or individual names?
Nate Hoskin: We're generally looking at market cap and sectors. So we definitely don't want to be entirely large cap. We will look at some smalls and mids. And then also thinking about, okay, if we want to invest in QQQ, or we wanna look at the NASDAQ in any way, we have to understand how actually overweight we are tech because you have the S&P 500 as a core holding, that's already really overweight tech. And so are you okay with having 30, 40% of your portfolio in the tech sector? Well, some people are. Some people work in tech and don't even realize how much of a risk that is to have half of their entire life involved in that volatile industry.
Cameron Howe: Yeah. It's an area like we, uh, one of the rebalance strategies we have within invest the palace to optimize around, let's say like you're a tech employee, you have one just talk options like that as a fixed asset and like optimizing outside of that. So like putting you in real estate industrials, something that's, which is difficult now, especially when the S and P I haven't actually looked at what it is right now. I remember it was like 40 maybe with like the make a cap performance is probably like 50% tech. But it's like, what do you, how do you invest now?
Nate Hoskin: Yeah, I think some of it is really dangerous to avoid, simply because technology has become the underpinning of everything that we do. Whether we're looking at microchips or we're looking at cell phones, there are some things that used to be like, oh, it's just technology. Well, no, now it's our daily life. Now it's how we connect with people. It's how we work, it's how we communicate. And so I think that... to some extent, the S&P 500 does represent our lives because those things are such enormous parts of how we live day to day. So I don't wanna stray entirely away from it, but I do think that looking at correlation structures and seeing if you can at least.
Cameron Howe: Mm-hmm.
Nate Hoskin: If you have the S&P and you know that it is overweight tech, how can you invest in something that complements that? Maybe you're not pushing for negative correlations, but at least very limited correlations. That way you can keep your tech exposure because we've seen how incredibly profitable that is, but you can balance a little bit of that volatility.
Cameron Howe: I couldn't agree more. I think, you know, there's the, maybe to give everyone a background on like what we're about to allude to around like modern portfolio theory. You know, modern portfolio theory is essentially, you know, you have like a risk return chart and you could take 10,000, 100,000 permutations of a portfolio of like whatever holdings you have. It ends up like plotting this chart, this frontier, the inefficient frontier along that risk/return curve and you can end up optimizing a portfolio in aggregate to minimize the volatility, to maximize your sharp ratio, to hit a targeted risk level or targeted return level that is optimal. So rather than thinking of low volatility investing, it was an area that I used to focus in on a lot on the quant side on should we be buying low volatility stocks?
Nate Hoskin: Mm-hmm.
Cameron Howe: But low volatility stocks to your point, Nate, can be very highly correlated with one another. The utility space, the telecom space, the consumer staple space typically are low vol, but they are very highly correlated with one another. So if your portfolio is moving in one direction, it can get amplified by having a lot of overlap within that versus like the approach with modern portfolio theory is you can end up picking some tech exposure, some utilities exposure, some financial exposure, and it'll optimize the holdings to minimize the volatility in aggregate rather than on like an individual level.
Nate Hoskin: And I think the efficient frontier is one of the coolest things that so few people know about investing because people know as a baseline that investing is risky, but they don't really know what that means. And when you look at the efficient frontier, the efficient frontier is not a straight line. It's not like for every additional risk you take, you get one additional unit of return.
Cameron Howe: Yeah.
Nate Hoskin: And so if it were that way, you would just take as much risk as you possibly could, because why not? You have a very solid understanding that you're going to get higher returns, but you don't actually get compensated for every unit of risk. And so that's the game is saying, well, I want to be in the tech world and I want to be in that sector, but I don't get compensated for just being invested in Apple, there are risks in there that I just don't get paid for, and I can get rid of those risks by keeping Apple in a diversified portfolio. So then I'm only taking the risks that I get paid for. That's, I mean, I think that's the most beautiful piece of science ever because it makes you money.
Cameron Howe: I, we're starting to go down the pathway here on adding a bit more like personalization flavor into things where have you ever looked into like the Black Litterman portfolios?
Nate Hoskin: It rings a bell, but I'm not sure.
Cameron Howe: It's essentially like an extrapolation on top of it that takes your views into consideration. So you can, let's say you're looking to do a re-battle and instead of just doing like a minimum volatility re-battle it can ask you like, what is your view on the markets right now? What is your view on individual sectors? So then you can take, it'll take that into consideration when building out your portfolio. So instead of just picking something on the minimus of that curve for the maximus, it can end up aligning better to um, your unique considerations. So that curve might be fixed for a certain, for like a random mix of individual holdings, but then you can start adding in constraints. Like, no, this guy really likes tech stocks. So like, let's change where that curve is. Is it to the left? Is it to the right in terms of like risk return? And then it optimizes the holdings based off of, uh, your own interests and your own market views. If they're right or they're wrong, doesn't really matter, but just like taking more of that personalized approach to things.
Nate Hoskin: That is fantastic because I think that's the thing that gets missed with sort of modern portfolio theory or theory optimal investing is that there is just only one answer. And you're like, well, what if the underlying assumptions are wrong? And so if you can change those assumptions and say, well, actually, no, we expect this sector to go down or we feel bad about this part of the market or we just feel bad about the market in general that's totally going to change how you invest and letting the mathematics back that up, that seems like a great way to run a portfolio all around.
Cameron Howe: Yeah, it's like what I find very interesting, like, and like the thing that we're trying to work on the most with Investpal is, you know, like I had to learn how to code to like do this type of stuff. And I had to read textbooks and you probably had to read textbooks on all of this. Like I studied the CFA, like I had to get a lot more in the weeds to figure all this out. And it became kind of out of reach for a generalist investor. And like when you're a generalist investor, do you think more of like, I need to own this stock? I need to own Nvidia, but you know, asset allocation is the driving force behind investment returns. I forget the stat, I think it's like 85% of, correct me if I'm wrong, but like 85% of portfolio returns are explained by asset allocation, not by picking stocks. Because over the long run, it doesn't really matter if you pick Nvidia, AMD, Intel, a rising tide lifts all boats. So if you think of it more to your point on like how you structure your portfolio on the asset allocation piece, that ends up rewarding you in the long run, rather than trying to bet consistently on picking that winning stock.
Nate Hoskin: which is why the indexes have done so unbelievably well. They are just asset allocation vehicles. And so they are eating up 85% of what explains all of your returns. And they're not risking everything to get that final 15 because yeah, I mean, for the audience, when we talk about return attribution, what we're really talking about is the difference between where is your money? Like, where is it in terms of asset allocation? And then what specific holdings do you have? That's security selection. And then when did you buy it? That's market timing. And so market timing and security selection actually don't make much of a difference at all. But that is all the general investor focuses on, is what stock should I buy? And should I buy it right now? Well, you realize that neither of those actually have much impact on whether or not you're going to make money and that they lose as often as they win. And the entire brunt of where you will be profitable is just in, what does my portfolio look like?
Cameron Howe: which becomes almost like too boring.
Nate Hoskin: I know it's kind of terrifying and it's hard sometimes to be a financial advisor because they're like what did you do with my portfolio last year? Nothing. I looked at it once a month and I rebalanced it twice. I did not change your holdings. I did not make any big trades. I don't have some crazy thesis about the state of the oil market and so we're short like Texas crude. None of that. We are just invested and riding and it's working.
Cameron Howe: And do you ever get challenged on like the value you're providing? Cause it almost seems like, you know, I need to give people action to show them that I'm providing value into their portfolio.
Nate Hoskin: Absolutely. And I overcomplicated my portfolio strategy massively in my early years in an attempt to justify my fee. And I underperformed as a result. So not only did I fail to justify my management fee, but I actually did worse for my clients because I was staring at it too much trying to prove that I was adding value to them. And so I think I will always be my harshest critic, to say the least, but I feel like I would really struggle to justify a management fee if it weren't for the things that I now charge a fixed fee for. Like the financial planning, the money management, talking about actually retaining people's financial health and making sure that they are paying down debt properly, that they have enough money in cash, that their credit cards are doing okay, and then that they are saving constantly into their investments. The logistics there, that's where I add a lot of value. When it comes to the investment management, my goal is really to add value by keeping them on the boat when things get scary.
Cameron Howe: Right, right, right. Making them, building a plan, making sure they stick to it.
Nate Hoskin: exactly holding them accountable.
Cameron Howe: So when you're building out like a financial plan for a HENRY a high income earner, what's the key piece there? Is it the regular contributions? Is it the initial starting value of their portfolio and their net worth?
Nate Hoskin: It's about the consistency in my experience, because whenever you look at a financial planning software or any retirement projections that you might pull up on Google, they all assume that you are going to put, let's say $7,000 into your Roth IRA every single year like clockwork between now and the day you retire. That's the only way the assumptions work. And so, if you can put in a whole bunch of money upfront, that absolutely helps because it has a longer time to compound. So if you're starting with a larger starting balance, that definitely has a greater impact. But what I've seen that really sets apart the people who have a 100% chance of retiring comfortably, have you heard of COAST-FY at all?
Cameron Howe: No, I have it.
Nate Hoskin: Coast-Fi, Coast Financial Independence is essentially you have set enough money aside and you have a reasonable savings goal month by month. And as long as you hit that savings goal, it is essentially inevitable that you will retire early.
Cameron Howe: Is that different than like F.I.R.E.?
Nate Hoskin: So F.I.R.E. is the baseline, like financial independence, retire early, that's what I would call the umbrella. And then there are a bunch of different things within that. There's like the entrepreneurial fire, which is what I'm doing, where your goal is to not be employed, but you're still gonna have a job because you have a business. There's fat fire, which is not just retiring, but retiring filthy rich. And then there's coast fi, which are people who will probably retire in there.
Cameron Howe: Gotcha.
Nate Hoskin: early 50s, so we're not talking about crazy early retirement, but they don't have to be saving like crazy and eating beans and rice in order to get there. They've set themselves up for success. So that consistency is the biggest thing that I see.
Cameron Howe: So, you know, just to summarize a little for like the any sort of individual investor listening to this right now, kind of the major approach is regular contributions doesn't necessarily matter how much you get started with creating a plan, sticking to it just like we all, we all hear. But also making sure on your investment strategy, it's boring. You're not trying to analyze the stock market constantly. It's developing out of investment strategy and asset allocation strategy that you can reliably contribute to over time.
Nate Hoskin: Yes, and that's why I say my whole job is to help people make financial freedom inevitable. And what I mean by that is we're going to have a portfolio and a rule book for you, that if you follow those rules, financial independence will be an inevitability for you. That's the whole goal of the financial plan. And then it's up to them to follow it and stay consistent. And that's the hard part.
Cameron Howe: So maybe switching gears a little bit to any financial professionals listening to this. You know, we have a lot of conversations around them trying to start penetrating a younger audience. What do you think is lacking from the current advisor financial toolkit that Gen Z, like younger investors, younger individuals are really looking and craving towards?
Nate Hoskin: I think it's education, personally. I think that the advisors who are educating and who are really making a priority of educating, not only their clients, but also their audience. Those are the people who are seeing an incredible amount of success. And that takes a lot of forms. I mean, some people have longer YouTube channels, then they're making longer 10, 15 minute videos, really going into depth on certain topics. Some people are more like me where they're making one minute snippets and posting it across every single social media platform. But the people who are educating to as wide an audience as possible, those are the ones who are really succeeding, and it's like 1% of advisors who are doing that. It is a crazy competitive advantage.
Cameron Howe: Right. And is it one where they're just not aware of it or the time commitment involved in having to create that content is a big inhibitor.
Nate Hoskin: I think it boils down to three things. One is compliance, the other is time, and then the third is hesitance, for lack of a better word, because a lot of people assume that they can't do it because of compliance. Both Nick, my co-founder, and I have gotten so many questions around, am I even allowed to post on TikTok? Like, can a financial advisor even legally post on there? Yes, absolutely you can.
Well, then how do I keep my content compliant? Well, how do you talk to your clients in a compliant way? How do you talk to your prospects in a compliant way? All the same rules apply. You are just speaking to a broader audience. And with the time, I think people look at me and I might be muddying this a little bit because I post a video a day and they're like, I would never be able to do that. I would never be able to make that happen. And you don't have to two videos a week, three videos a week, like that is a fantastic place to go. And when they're a minute long, I mean, I do a video a day and I still only spend two, three hours a week on it. And I actually just, I actually just did this math because I was curious, but if I had to pay for the impressions that I got on social media every single week through paid ads, so let's say like Instagram ads or something like that.
Cameron Howe: Oh wow.
Nate Hoskin: If I had to pay for the amount of weekly impressions that I get, it would cost me $18,000 a week. Yeah. Just based on the Instagram ads that I've run and the Facebook ads that I've run, the cost per mil, the cost per thousand impressions, if you take that and you multiply it by my weekly impressions, they would have charged me 18 grand to give me that traffic.
Cameron Howe: Oh wow. Huh. That's crazy. So yeah, you gave up more time upfront to build up that content calendar and everything rather than investing it directly into paid ads and kind of skipping the line, but now it's paying dividends for you. Like I'm sure if you stop making content today, you'd still have an inflow of customers, clients into you based off of everything you already have on.
Nate Hoskin: Absolutely, and it's a snowball where every single week, even if my weekly impressions don't change very much and my followership doesn't change very much, I am getting more scheduled meetings every single week because they are now coming in from a more like, just a more in depth base of content. Every single one has the opportunity to convert and now that I'm at 785 some odd videos, that's a lot of opportunities for someone to get interested in what I do.
Cameron Howe: Yeah, absolutely. Very impressive stuff.
Nate Hoskin: Thank you.
Cameron Howe: So Nate, maybe we'll park it there. If anyone's interested, let's say any retail investor interested in checking out your content, where can they find you?
Nate Hoskin: The best places on my TikTok at Nate Hoskin, that one gets everything. I put some things on LinkedIn, I put some things on Instagram, but TikTok is the depository for every single thing that I make. That's the best way to go. And then if you wanna learn more about what I do or actually get in touch with and have a conversation with me, my website, HoskinCapital.com is the best place.
Cameron Howe: And then any investment advisors checking this out who want to develop out a marketing strategy, I know you have, uh, you and your co-founder have a agency around that. So if you want to do a little bit of a plug, uh, how can they find you?
Nate Hoskin: Yeah, so N2 Content Marketing because it's Nick and Nate and Nick Meyer is my co-founder. He is Nick Talks Money on all the socials to check him out. And then together at n2co that's the best way to learn about what we do. We also post a lot of our progress, our business, that sort of thing on LinkedIn. And so you can find me, Nate Hoskin, CFP, or you can find Nick, Nick Meyer, CFP on LinkedIn and just shoot us a DM.
Cameron Howe: Okay, amazing. Nate, I think it was very interesting getting to talk a bit more nerdy on portfolio theory, thinking about asset allocation a bit more than stock selection. We'd love to have you back on the show in the future.
Nate Hoskin: I'm looking forward to it, Cam. Thanks so much for having me.
Cameron Howe: Thanks, Nate.
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