ERX Wealth Partners

06/24/2026

Every decision was right. The order was the risk.

06/22/2026

Today we lost one of the most influential economic figures of the last half-century. Alan Greenspan was 100.

For me, the news brings back a very different chapter of my life.

From 1996 through 2009, alongside my work as a financial advisor, I covered capital markets, fixed income, Federal Reserve policy, and FOMC meetings as a broadcast correspondent for CBS News and KYW Newsradio. During those years, Greenspan wasn't just the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

He was a market-moving institution all by himself.

It got to the point where, before every FOMC meeting, we had what came to be known as the "briefcase watch." As Greenspan walked into the Federal Reserve building in Washington, pundits, reporters, and traders would study the size and apparent weight of his briefcase, trying to divine what it might mean for interest-rate policy. A thick briefcase. A thin one. Everyone had a theory.

It sounds almost absurd today.

But that's how much influence the man carried.

Traders dissected every word. Economists parsed every sentence. Markets moved not only on what he decided, but on the nuance of his language—the famous "Fedspeak."

His tenure spanned some of the defining events of the modern economy: the crash of 1987, the long expansion of the 1990s, the Asian financial crisis, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the dot-com bubble and its bursting, and the uncertainty that followed September 11th, when the resilience of the American financial system was tested in ways few could have imagined.

He also gave the investing world one of its most enduring phrases: irrational exuberance.

Like every figure of his stature, his legacy is debated. Some will always remember "The Maestro," who guided the economy through extraordinary times. Others point to policies and philosophies that economists and historians continue to debate today.

History will render its verdict.

What is beyond debate is that Alan Greenspan occupied one of the most important seats in the world during years that reshaped not only the American economy, but the global financial system.

Those of us who covered the Greenspan years witnessed a remarkable chapter in American economic history. We won't see another era quite like it.

Rest in peace, Chairman Greenspan.

— Mike Giongo

06/20/2026

Saturday morning. Coffee in hand. Walking on this glorious morning.

Early in my career, I became fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci — not just the art, but the way he observed the world.

There is a phrase often associated with him:

𝗦𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝘃𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗲 — 𝘁𝗼 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗵𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗲𝗲.

That idea has stayed with me.

In wealth management, we hear the same words constantly:

Coordinated.
Integrated.
Comprehensive.
Holistic.

Those are good words, and they represent sincere attempts to deliver thoughtful planning.

But they are not the finish line.

They are the starting point.

The harder question is whether anyone truly sees the relationships between the pieces.

What depends on what?

What assumptions are being carried from one recommendation to another?

What happens when one decision moves before another?

What appears sound in isolation but changes when the sequence changes?

That is where I have spent years learning how to look.

Not simply at decisions.

But at the space between decisions.

Because the right recommendation, made at the wrong time, in the wrong sequence, or without consideration of its dependencies, can lead to a very different result.

Have a great weekend.

— Mike

05/21/2026

Our working paper, Sequence of Decisions Risk: A Proposed Governance Framework for Complex Financial and Organizational Systems, is now available on SSRN.

The paper explores how decision order, timing, coordination, and governance may influence outcomes across complex financial and organizational systems.

Grateful to have the framework posted for review and future discussion.

This paper introduces Sequence of Decisions Risk as a proposed governance variable within increasingly complex financial and organizational systems. While moder

04/26/2026

I've been thinking about this book for a few weeks. Here's where I landed.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝗶𝗽 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗗𝗶𝗱𝗻'𝘁 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲

There's a trip you keep meaning to take.

You just haven't gone.

Bill Perkins wrote a book about why that matters more than you think.

It's called Die with Zero. I read it. And I agree with most of it.

His argument is simple and devastating. Dying with a large balance sheet is not a victory. It's evidence. Evidence that you traded your best years - your healthy years, your highest-energy years ... for a number you never used.

The cobblestones of Florence feel different at fifty-eight than they do at seventy-eight. That's not sentiment. That's biology. The wine, the wandering, the three-hour lunch in a piazza - those experiences require a version of you that has a shelf life.

So does the ski trip. The summer your grandchildren still think you're invincible.

Perkins calls them time buckets. Windows when certain experiences are fully alive - meaningful in ways that compound as memories long after the moment passes.

Then the window closes. It doesn't announce itself.

It just closes.

Here's where I part ways with him.

Perkins frames this as a spending problem. Spend more. Defer less. Die with zero.

After twenty-five years with physicians, business owners, and legacy families - I'd argue it's not a spending problem at all.

It's a permission problem.

The people I've worked with who missed those windows didn't miss them because they lacked money or courage or desire. They missed them because they were carrying one question they couldn't answer with confidence.

Can I actually afford to live this way without it costing me everything I built?

That question, unresolved, becomes paralysis.
And paralysis looks exactly like discipline from the outside.

Perkins tells you to spend. He doesn't tell you how to know.

That's the gap.

You are likely standing inside the most consequential decade of your financial life right now. The window between peak resources and peak health is real - and most people don't recognize it until they're looking back through it.

The trip to Italy isn't really about Italy.

It's about whether you understood your life well enough... early enough... to live it on your own terms.

04/24/2026

04/15/2026

We are down in Bethany Beach this week on a four day ERX retreat, stepping away from the day to day, catching some ocean air, and taking time to think about where things are going.

We never expected it to be this warm in April.

We got lucky. And we are thankful for it.

A few days like this has a way of surfacing what actually matters.

Lately, one idea keeps returning.

AI.

Not as a tool.

As a structural shift.

We have been in this since the beginning. When the first tools came out, the first thing we saw was not the capability. It was the noise. A firehose of information, unfiltered and continuous, with nothing on the other end to convert it into decisions.

That observation did not stay an observation.

It became the architecture.

For most of modern decision making, the constraint was access to information. Better inputs led to better outcomes.

That relationship has broken down.

Information is now abundant, immediate, and continuous. More input, without structure, degrades clarity.

The constraint has not disappeared. It has moved.

From access to decision structure.

Outcomes are not determined by the data available. They are determined by the structure imposed on that data before action is taken.

The advantage is no longer who has more information. It is who can filter, structure, and act with clarity.

We see this in the people we work with every day. Physicians, business owners, family enterprises. Accomplished people. Not lacking information. Drowning in it. The missing piece is never more data. It is always a clearer structure for what to do with it.

That function is not solved by technology. It is solved by judgment. Not instinct. Structured judgment.

What we built at ERX is the filter over the firehose. A clarity engine. One where judgment and governance are not added on top of the advisory process. They are the advisory process. That is the architecture. That is the difference.

A divide is forming. Not between those who use AI and those who do not. But between those who have restructured how decisions are made and those applying new tools to old frameworks.

At first, the difference is subtle. Over time, it becomes decisive.
Because decisions compound. And so does the structure behind them.

In a world of unlimited information, clarity becomes the only advantage that compounds.

There is something about being near the water for a few days. The waves do not stop. They just keep coming. You do not try to control them. You learn how to read them.

That is the shift.

We will head back from Bethany re-energized. Not with more information. But with a clearer sense of why the architecture we built was made for exactly this.

04/05/2026

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝘂𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸

There’s a 40-minute stretch during the Artemis II mission when Earth can’t reach the crew — the spacecraft slips behind the far side of the moon and everything goes dark.

No signal. No contact. No “just checking in.”

Just silence.

It’s not a risk. It’s part of the mission.

So everything that matters gets handled before they get there.

Astronaut Reid Wiseman — who lost his wife to cancer — recently said he walked his kids through where everything was: will, trust, documents.

Not because something’s about to happen.

Because he already knows what happens when it does.

Meanwhile, Back on Earth…
We don’t go to space, but we create the same situation all the time.

A health event.
An absence.
A moment where someone else has to step in.

And when that happens, nobody cares what you meant to do.
They’re working with what’s actually done.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗜 𝗦𝗲𝗲 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲

Trusts never funded.
Documents never signed.
Beneficiaries that don’t match anything.
Accounts titled like a group project where nobody talked to each other.

Sometimes it’s all sitting in a nice leather binder.

Great — if the goal was to have a really impressive binder.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵

Most plans aren’t wrong.

They’re just unfinished.

Which, when it matters, is the same thing.

𝗙𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁

Astronauts assume there will be a stretch where no one can ask questions.

So they remove the need for questions.

Most people assume there will be time to explain things later.

There isn’t.

There’s no such thing as “almost done” when someone else has to figure it out.

03/30/2026

On Doctors’ Day, we recognize the physicians, medical practices, and healthcare leaders who have entrusted ERX with their personal and professional lives.

Through that trust, we have had the opportunity to serve at the intersection of personal wealth, practice leadership, and the broader business of medicine — a responsibility we do not take lightly.

We are grateful to the physicians and medical leaders who have allowed us to build alongside them in service to this community.

To those leading in medicine every day — thank you.

— ERX Wealth