I hope you're having a great weekend.
On Tuesday night, a lot of us spent the evening watching the election.
It's always fascinating. Election night is really a giant study in data science. County-by-county turnout. Gas prices. Margins from two years ago. All the little factors that shape how people act and what they believe.
As a geography nerd, I'll admit I'm jealous of the people on screen who know every county by heart. Their command of the map is extraordinary.
And somewhere around the third swing county, it hit me.
These people are meteorologists.
They're tracking pressure systems. Reading patterns. Watching a front move across the map and telling us what it means for the rest of the night.
The forecast has company now
The election-night map used to be the only forecast in the room. Not anymore.
Prediction markets have become a second forecast, and millions of people now watch it alongside the news. Nearly $1.9 billion was traded on the midterms across Kalshi and Polymarket. Kalshi says viewers on its midterm markets outnumber traders five to one. And a Paradigm/Echelon Insights poll found more than a third of likely voters have used prediction markets in some form, whether to trade or just check prices.
They're often right, too. Kalshi and Polymarket correctly called the Democratic sweep of Congress, and both pushed past 99% for control of both chambers on Tuesday night. A Vanderbilt study of nearly 2,500 markets from the 2024 election found them well calibrated overall.
The heaviest users are young. A February 2026 Paradigm poll found 38% of 18- to 34-year-olds had put money into prediction markets, compared with 3% of people 65 and older. Those are your clients' kids and your next generation of clients.
Add in social media. Bloomberg's Matt Levine described election night as "a vast mosaic of information that you can, with great effort and attention, piece together."
That's the world your clients live in every day. More screens. More voices. More forecasts. And very little help making sense of any of it.
Bill Randby
When I lived in Omaha, we had a meteorologist named Bill Randby. He is legendary.
The city sits right on a major jet stream path, so storms there are frequent. It’s easy to ignore them. If you turned on the TV to check in on a tornado watch and you saw Bill’s suit jacket was off, sleeves rolled up, you knew it was serious. Everybody knew that cue.
We trusted him. We could see how much he cared. But his care was built on something deeper: he knew his audience. He knew how a storm system would hit each pocket of the viewing area differently, and he told each of them what to do about it.
Bill isn't the only one with the radar. He is the one who can explain what it means for your slice of town in a way that shows he cares. When he tells you to take shelter now, you know he isn’t being hyperbolic. He’s naming your street.
That's the role our industry is being called into.
The call to our community
Our clients don't need another forecast. They have plenty.
They need a guide who can interpret, simplify, and explain what actually matters for them to do next. Someone who helps them get into the right mindset first, and the right behaviors second.
And we know the right behaviors are usually far more boring than anything the talking heads are selling. That's fine. Boring and steady is how most financial success actually happens.
So how do we become the Bill Randby for our clients? A few ideas.
Find a time-tested philosophy and master it. Have a doctrine for how you work. Know exactly how it applies to each client. Then communicate it consistently, so clients hear the same steady voice whether the markets are calm or turbulent.
Anticipate the fears. Every client carries specific worries. Know them before they walk in. Build them into your presentations, your one-on-ones, and your annual reviews, so you're answering the question before the clouds form and make them ask it.
Understand the personalities in the home. How does a client think about fear compared with their partner? How do they feel about risk when it comes to their kids, the next generation, or their next stage of life? When the storm watch begins, who goes outside to see what’s happening, and who grabs the flashlights and blankets on their way to the basement?
Use your information to guide, not to overwhelm. You have more data on your clients than any prediction market ever will. Use it to bring them back to what's real for their family, and cut through the noise.
There's an extraordinary opportunity here, and a real challenge, to do this well.
The screens will keep multiplying. The forecasts will keep getting louder.
When the next storm rolls in, your clients will look for the person who knows their town.
Roll up your sleeves and make sure it's you.
Have a great week.
Jud
On the Pod: How to Turn Client Reviews Into Better Client Experiences
Episode 169: This week on Next Mile, Kyle Van Pelt is joined by Brendan Frazier, creator of The Ultimate Meeting Series and host of The Human Side of Money. Brendan began his career consulting with advisors on retirement income before building an advisory business and focusing his work on behavioral finance, psychology, and communication. He created The Human Side of Money to translate those ideas into practical tools for advisors.
Kyle and Brendan explore why annual review meetings often become routine maintenance instead of the anchor of the client experience. Brendan shares a framework built around whether clients feel understood, know how they’re doing, and believe they’ll be okay, plus why purpose and the desired client feeling should shape the meeting. They also discuss connecting with beneficiaries before wealth transfers, using AI for meaningful callbacks and better follow-up, and why trust, empathy, and behavior-change skills become more valuable as technology improves.
In this episode:
(00:00) - Intro
(01:41) - Brendan's money moment
(08:17) - Why client review meetings fall short
(10:04) - Reactive value versus intentional client value
(14:18) - Designing the meeting around the client
(15:29) - The three questions every review should answer
(16:56) - Defining the purpose and feeling of a great meeting
(18:49) - What “Am I going to be okay?” means for wealthy clients
(23:16) - Rethinking the generational wealth transfer
(27:34) - Building relationships with the next generation before the inheritance
(30:28) - Using AI to create more room for human advice
(33:23) - Using callbacks to make clients feel remembered
(37:51) - Brendan's outlook on the future of the wealth management industry
(40:55) - What human behavior tells us about the future of advice
(43:10) - Brendan's Milemarker Minute
Event:
The Control Layer: Turning Scattered Files Into Reports, Proposals, and Beautiful Experiences
Your firm already has everything it needs to produce great client reports and winning proposals. It’s just spread across a custodian portal, a CRM, three spreadsheets, a shared drive, and someone’s desktop. So every quarter-end and every new prospect turns into the same scramble: pull the files, reconcile the numbers, paste them into a template, fix the formatting, and hope nothing changed in the meantime.
That isn’t a reporting problem. It’s a control problem. When there’s no single layer governing your data, every output gets rebuilt by hand, and the quality of what your clients see depends on who had time that week.
In this session, Jud Mackrill and Kailash Duraiswami will show what changes when firms put a control layer between their scattered files and the experiences they deliver. You’ll see how firms are taking documents, exports, and system data, bringing them under one governed foundation, and turning them into client reports, proposals, and branded experiences without the manual assembly. They’ll walk through real workflows, where firms typically get stuck, and what it takes to make polished output repeatable instead of heroic.
This hour is built for operations leaders, firm principals, and anyone who’s tired of spending skilled hours on copy-and-paste work.
Your hosts
Jud Mackrill, Co-Founder & CEO, Milemarker
Kailash Duraiswami, CTO, Milemarker
Milemarker on the Road
Catch my team on the road at the following events or cities:
Chicago - November 10-11
Scottsdale, AZ - November 11-14
Omaha, NE - November 15-17
New York, NY - November 18-19
If you would like to arrange a meeting time, please reply to this email, and we’ll schedule something on the calendar.
Jud Mackrill