Meet an Advisor: Simon Brady on Mortgages, Rates, & Exchange

Evan Harp: We interviewed you about your practice before, but give us a refresh on your firm and your investment philosophy.

Simon Brady: Sure, it’s a fiduciary fee-only RIA. I’m a complete solo practitioner with an hourly compensation “project-style” model. What that allows me to do is pivot towards younger individuals, couples and families, regardless of net worth or investable asset level. The sweet spot is sort of early 20s to late 40s, [people] who are fully in the accumulation phase of their financial lives.

My philosophy is generally a “buy and monitor” ideology. The recommendations are exclusively limited to ETFs and not any individual stocks, but not necessarily completely restricted to only straight-up index ETFs. I do see some value in certain factor-based and algorithmically semi-active products, such as those made available by the likes of Dimensional Fund Advisors (DFA) and Avantis, both of whom will hopefully have a presence at Exchange 2026.

Essentially, what I want to do is create thoughtful, appropriately-allocated buckets for clients. The risk profiles of these buckets differ according to the varying associated time horizons. And I also include a high yield cash component in there as well, using platforms like Betterment or Flourish. I view hard-working cash as a bucket with its own role in a client’s entire financial picture, just like a retirement-targeted bucket.

I can either do all the heavy lifting, building out portfolios on behalf of the clients using the Betterment for Advisors platform or, if they prefer, I can simply advise into investments that they hold at their current providers like Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, whatever it is. If clients want to maintain those accounts, I can recommend specific ETFs and curated allocations for them to set up and self-manage themselves on those platforms. That’s broadly my investment model.

Harp: Excellent. So, time for the loaded question. What do you make of the current market environment? And for readers, this answer was recorded in mid-December, 2025.

Brady: It’s certainly not dull. I am not experiencing the common end-of-year slowdown in terms of client contact. That’s just not happening this year. But, given the age range I described earlier, the people I mostly work with tend to have longer time horizons. I still believe that, for them, socking money away into different buckets of thoughtfully-allocated portfolios that are low cost, highly diversified and risk-appropriate based on time horizon is the way to go; rather than reacting to short-term market fluctuations.

I do send out a short weekly market report to clients and prospects in which I talk about more micro current conditions, but the purpose of that is not really to incite any kind of action on the part of the client, rather to just help increase their understanding of how financial markets are functioning at a given point in time. I certainly don’t want them to be guinea pigs for new fads like the “democratization” of access to private equity or private credit or anything like that. I’m not ready to subject my clients to that sort of early-stage risk and illiquidity at the moment.

While I absolutely seek to fully understand what is going on in markets these days, I do not want to use that knowledge to encourage clients to make short-term active investment decisions.

Harp: That’s a good, thoughtful answer.

Brady: And just one more comment on the current market environment: The one thing that I am really seeing now is a huge misunderstanding among clients, particularly younger clients, about the relationship between the Fed Funds Rate and the mortgage rate. You know, there’s easily a world where the Fed can keep cutting and cutting and cutting and mortgage rates move higher. I mean, we saw that in 2024. I think a lot of people haven’t quite grasped this. They overestimate the correlation between what they hear that the Fed is doing and what they’re going to be paying on their mortgage or car loan. That’s one thing that I think I’m seeing more and more of.

Harp: Pivoting to Exchange, how have things been since the last Exchange conference for you? Was there an insight or a speaker who carried you or helped you in navigating through anything that happened in 2025?

Brady: 2025 was my second Exchange conference. I was in Miami the year before. I always appreciate the opportunity to see Dr. David Kelly in action whenever I can and I openly steal some of his insights and share them with my own clients. I will try to accredit them when needed, but sometimes his ideas become such an integral part of my thinking that their origin becomes blurred. But I find him to be so insightful and the way he phrases things makes it very easy to remember different parts of what he says.

His wisdom can be very useful to me when talking to clients, particularly to those at the extreme ends of the risk spectrum. So maybe the people who are planning to be over-aggressive or over-conservative. I will use a lot of what he says to try and drag them a little bit more towards the middle and away from those extremes, both of which can be damaging to client wealth in their own way.

Harp: I see you have “Your Best Financial Life” by Ann Lester on your shelf. She was also terrific last year..

Brady: Yeah, she really was. Certainly for my clients in their 20s, I tell them to buy the book and read it carefully. Along with Ramit Sethi’s “I Will Teach You To Be Rich.” Any chance you can get Ramit to speak at Exchange sometime soon?

Harp: What are you looking forward to about Exchange 2026?

Brady: I think recharging my ETF batteries, as it were. I do try and stay on top of developments in the ETF ecosystem. VettaFi is great for doing that, but there’s clearly going to be some things I may have missed and I will catch up on those at the conference. And again, just such high quality speakers. I look forward to stealing more of their insights and, frankly, getting out of this New York weather and being somewhere warm for a few days would also be nice.

Harp: I am right there with you.

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