From The Advisor’s Fuel Podcast with Adam Koós, CFP®, CMT®, CEPA — a conversation with Vincent Randazzo, CMT, founder of View Right Advisors and creator of the Defender program.
Most advisors say they manage risk for their clients. Very few actually have a process for it.
That gap — between believing in risk management and having a repeatable, data-driven system to execute it — is the whole subject of this conversation. Vincent Randazzo spent two decades in technical research, including a formative stretch at Lowry Research (now CFRA) working alongside the late Paul Desmond, before building Defender, a rules-based framework designed to hand independent advisors the kind of risk discipline that institutions have always had. Here’s what came out of the discussion.
Randazzo’s core observation is that advisors don’t fail at risk management because they don’t understand risk. They fail because they were taught not to try — that stepping aside is “timing the market,” that technical analysis is voodoo, that the only respectable move is to stay fully invested and ride it out.
He points to a Warren Buffett line that captures the cost of that mindset: the industry’s devotion to efficient-market theory has been an enormous gift to the people willing to act, because it’s a huge advantage to compete against opponents who’ve been taught it’s useless to even try. The fund and ETF companies, after all, only get paid when you stay invested.
For both Adam and Vincent, the lesson was forged in fire — both started their careers into the teeth of a bear market. When you begin in a crash, the math of drawdowns never leaves you: a 50% loss requires a 100% gain just to get back to even. That’s not opinion. That’s arithmetic.
The engine underneath Defender is market breadth — and it’s the concept every advisor should understand even if they never use the program.
Breadth, in its simplest form, is the advance-decline line: a running tally of how many stocks go up versus down each day. The more stocks advancing, the healthier the market internally.
Here’s why that matters more than the headline index. The major indices (the S&P 500, the Nasdaq) are market-cap weighted, so a handful of mega-cap names can hold the whole thing up while most stocks quietly deteriorate underneath. Adam’s analogy: someone can look perfectly healthy on the outside while multiple cancers grow undetected inside. Vincent’s version: it’s a stool with two legs already removed — you keep wondering how it’s still standing.
At major market tops, this creates a mirage. It looks like euphoria, but what’s actually happening is more subtle — big money is quietly concentrating into the largest, safest names and trimming everything else. The index looks fine. Meanwhile 60–70% of stocks are already falling, in a slow cascade from small caps to mid caps to large caps. You can’t see it without an x-ray. Breadth is the x-ray.
The problem Randazzo watched advisors struggle with for 20 years was overload: too busy, too many hats, too much information, leading to analysis paralysis and no process. So Defender is deliberately simple. Rather than hand advisors another 50-page report they’ll never read, it gives an answer.
Based on more than a century of data, the model translates market conditions into one of four positions:
That’s it. Clear, straightforward, data-driven, and — crucially — free of emotion. As Vincent puts it: we don’t predict, we prepare. It’s the same principle Adam’s firm lives by, telling clients they’re trend followers, not trend predictors, because no one can reliably predict what any stock, fund, or the market will do tomorrow.
The value of getting ahead of a drawdown shows up in the compounding math, and it’s bigger than most people realize.
Everyone knows stocks average roughly 9% a year. But averages hide the thing that matters: sequence. Three years of 9%, 9%, 9% averages 9%. So does −30%, +27%, +30%. Same average, wildly different outcomes — the second path leaves you with roughly half as much. This is sequence-of-returns risk, and it becomes devastating the closer a client gets to (or the deeper they get into) retirement. As Adam says, quoting the old joke, plenty of people have drowned in a river that was, on average, four feet deep.
The goal isn’t to beat the market every day. Clients want two things: to know they’ll be okay (that’s the financial plan), and to know their advisor has a plan for when markets fall apart. Most advisors have an answer for the first and nothing for the second. “The house is on fire, but we don’t have a plan” is a miserable place to be — for the client and for the advisor.
And there’s an aligned-incentive angle advisors often miss: when markets fall 40–50% and portfolios drop 25–30%, so does the firm’s revenue. Protecting clients from catastrophic drawdowns isn’t a conflict of interest — you’re on the same side of the table.
Late in the conversation, Randazzo shared the handful of things he’d watch every week to stay aligned with the market’s real condition — a simple version any advisor can adopt:
His two biggest “chart crimes,” for the record: no logarithmic scale, and no time identifier on the x-axis. If you don’t know whether you’re looking at a 3-minute or monthly chart, the chart is useless.
Asked for the one thing a rules-based process gives an advisor, both men landed on the same word before the other could finish: confidence. Confidence instills trust, trust is earned through consistency and preparation, and — as Vincent put it — you cannot put a price tag on trust.
Adam manages his own model portfolios and has no interest in managing money for other advisors — so if you want to add technical analysis and a risk-management framework to your own practice, Vincent’s contact info is in the episode show notes. But if what you’re really after is a more complete, scalable way to run and grow your practice:
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