Market crashes don’t destroy wealth—unprepared investors do. If you’ve spent years building wealth through real estate, business ownership, or investing, you know the real challenge isn’t just growth—it’s protecting what you’ve built when markets turn. Too many investors operate without a defined downside strategy, leaving themselves exposed to 20–30% drawdowns and forced into emotional decisions at the worst possible time. But what if your portfolio had a built-in “loss floor”—a boundary designed to limit downside while still allowing for upside participation?
That’s the core idea behind the approach from Larry Kriesmer of Measured Risk Portfolios. In this article, we explore why traditional strategies often fail in volatile markets and how a disciplined, risk-managed framework can help you stay in control, preserve capital, and position your wealth for long-term freedom and impact—no matter what the market does next.
Episode Highlights Here:
Brett
Before we jump into this episode, I want to invite you to join our community to help you become a better steward scale to billions and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want you to do is to click the subscribe button right now. I love your support. It’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me. Welcome to the build it to billions podcast where we got successful entrepreneurs and investors on the journey from millions to billions. We believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth and life starts every single day the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goal is to have to scale and compound your wealth and life so you can give more or all of it away to help MVPs. My name is Brett Schwartz, and I’m excited to be your host today, because I get to interview an amazing individual who has tremendous experience. He’s going to bring some unique insights around investing, around some unique tax, tax strategy here, and he’s from my, one of my most, you know, greatest city in the world, San Diego, at least, that’s where he’s at now. And we’re going to be talking about measured risk. How to build a measure risk portfolio. Our guest is, is going to share all about fat and so much more. Please welcome the show with me. Mr. Larry, Kriesmer,
Larry
Thank you. Brett, that’s an energetic introduction. Hopefully I’ll keep up with you.
Brett
No, I’m sure you will. And usually, I have your whole bio in front of me, but since our you know, Alliance got crossed here, I don’t have that in front of me. So be great just for your
for the listeners to hear a little bit more about your story and your current focus.
Larry
Yeah, absolutely. We are a registered investment advisor Ria, and we’ve been in that model since 2007, and my business partner and I have been together for now something longer than 20 plus years. We measure by how old his youngest son is, because his wife wasn’t pregnant with him when we got together. So, it’s been a long time. Very successful partnership. And I started out in in business as a life insurance agent, very humble beginnings. Got interested in the wealth management side of things. Went through a sort of a process of discovery, and actually, we got a brief second, I’ll just talk about the origin story. I mean, we were trained on building portfolios in a very traditional method, you know, the diversification with stocks and bonds, and overtime, what my partner and I realized was that most of the return was coming from our decisions on where we would allocate money, like whether it was large cap or small cap or midcap or bonds, right? It’s going to that really is the determinant of where you’re going to get your get your return from, and not very much was coming from the managers that we referred the money to. So stock, timing and selection is not particularly part of the rate of return decision. So early, sorry, late in the 90s, we started to take that responsibility on our own and started using ETFs to get exposure to the to the broad sectors, and, you know, build really diversified, well diversified portfolios. And it was in the tech bubble that burst in the end of the 90s where I got my first kind of slap across the face with diversified portfolios not doing well. And when the market started to turn south, in 2002 1001 again, in 2002 you know, we get a call from a client asking, Larry, how much worse Do you think this can get? And the reality was, I had no answer. In fact, we were blazing new territory together, and that was really not good. It was, it was a bad experience for the client. Was a bad experience for me as an advisor. And, you know, it shook me because people that had taken my advice and bought the things I recommended were now, you know, pretty much panicking. I couldn’t assure them of any kind of downside limit. They watched their portfolios drop by 10% and then by 15% and then by 20% and when they asked for help, you know, there is no answer, or there was no answer. So that was really the sort of The Crucible under which I just I decided, as a as an industry and as a career, I did not want to do this again. I did not want to go through this process. And it led me to really search for a different solution, and that different solution has now manifest itself as measured risk portfolios, and I can now answer honestly and really down to a very small, finite dollar amount, how much risk is in somebody’s portfolio. And that creates a whole different kind of experience when you go through negative time periods,
Brett
absolutely Larry Kriesmer, spelled K, R, I, E, S, M, E, R, you can learn and connect with him by going to measured risk portfolios.com. measuredriskportfolios.com
Brett
So, if you like this little, short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview, and please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody
Watch the episode here:
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About Larry Kriesmer
Larry Kriesmer is a financial professional associated with Measured Risk Portfolios, where he focuses on helping investors navigate market volatility through disciplined, risk-managed portfolio strategies. His work centers on aligning investment decisions with a core objective many high-net-worth individuals share—protecting capital first, while still participating in long-term market growth. By emphasizing structured asset allocation and downside awareness, he helps clients move away from reactive investing toward a more intentional, rules-based approach.
Larry is particularly aligned with investors seeking stability after major liquidity events or those nearing retirement who want to reduce exposure to large market drawdowns. His philosophy challenges the conventional belief that significant losses are simply part of the investing journey, instead advocating for strategies designed to create greater consistency, confidence, and control over long-term wealth outcomes.
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