Tag Archives: stock market

If You’re Under 50 Years Old

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You should be a fanatical Bear fan. No, not the hapless football team in Chicago, the bear stock market. You should be rooting for further losses, more blood letting, a crash for the ages even. For several years, it’s been impossible to get the first half of the investing equation right—buying low. Stocks are still fairly pricey, but if you’re a youngster of say 29 or 39 or 49, and you have any savings, do what you can to maintain the downward momentum. Don’t just sit there. Use your “go to” personal curses on the Fed. Write JP and tell him to raise interest rates to 10%. Start a war in a distant land and wreak additional havoc on supply chains.

Similarly, mobilize with other youth to pop the housing bubble. Get JP to raise interest rates to 10% so no one can afford a mortgage. Then go full-Amish and build a bunch of homes together to increase supply.

Down, down, down go equity and home prices. You got this.

You Can’t Handle The Truth About Wealth Building

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Social scientists say we can’t multitask, but they haven’t met me. I’m doing pushups and watching a business news channel. A stock market expert/analyst just said there are several market “headwinds” including the invasion of KUWAIT. Then, a few sentences later, he said it a second time. That’s an amazing two-fer. . . an embarrassing history and geography fail.

So why would anyone listen to him bloviate on what the market is going to do?!

Instead, MSNBC should’ve invited me and my crystal ball. Here’s what I woulda said.

The most credible analysts expect VERY modest annual returns over the next decade. Meaning low single digit. Even less than anticipated annual inflation, meaning negative nominal returns, especially after taxes.

So what’s a person who has gotten used to hardly any inflation combined with double digit market and housing price returns to do? To not lose ground. To continue building wealth.

There’s only one answer. Save more. How to save more? Earn more and/or spend less. Now, you probably know why MSNBC didn’t call me.

Friday Assorted Links

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1. Estimated car cost as a predictor of driver yielding behaviors for pedestrians.

“Drivers of higher cost cars were less likely to yield to pedestrians at a midblock crosswalk.”

What are your theories for this?

2. Olympic swimming champion Sun Yang banned for eight years. Long suspected. Eight years though, talk about swimming dirty. How to make amends to the numerous clean swimmers that lost to Yang?

3. The darts player beating men at their own game.

“She’s going to stand out. It’s great for the sport. Stereotypically, it’s associated with the pub, beards and beer bellies. But that’s changing.”

4. iPhone 11 Pro vs. Galaxy S20 Ultra camera comparison: Which phone is best? Damn, kills me to write the conclusion:

“. . . the iPhone can’t compete with Samsung’s zoom king.”

And only $1,400.

5. What’s happening with the stock market these days? A beginner’s guide to investing.

 

The Week That Was

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From The Wall Street Journal:

“Andrew Freedman, a 31-year-old finance professional, was in an Uber in Connecticut on Monday morning when he noticed his driver fiddling with his phone. When he asked his driver to pay attention to the road, he was stunned by his response: ‘Do you mind if I pull over for a minute? The market’s open, I have to sell some things.'”

LOL.

We Are Overdue For A Stock Market Correction

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How bad was the Great Depression?

A timely, eye-opening Wall Street Journal article by Jason Zweig.

“The Dow peaked at 381.17 on Sept. 3, 1929. It finally hit bedrock at 41.22 on July 8, 1932, down 89.2%. In less than 35 months, a dollar invested in stocks shriveled into barely more than a dime.”

How wrong were the experts?

“In a newsreel from Oct. 30, 1929 . . . Irving Fisher, the nation’s leading economist and a Yale professor, proclaimed: ‘It now looks as though the bottom of the market had been found.’

The market found the bottom, all right—84% lower and almost three years later.”

How long did it take for the market to rebound?

“The Dow didn’t surpass its 1929 high until Nov. 23, 1954, a quarter-century later.”

How many people held their stock investments long enough to break even? A clue.

 “A 1954 survey by the Federal Reserve found that only 7% of middle-class households said they preferred to invest in stocks over savings bonds, bank accounts or real estate.”

How are we still getting the lesson of the Great Depression wrong?

“No one who lived through the crash of 1929 would agree with the view, advanced in the late 1990s, that stocks become riskless if you hold them long enough.”

Zweig’s cogent conclusion:

“To be a long-term investor in stocks, you have to be prepared to lose more money for longer than seems possible. Anyone who takes that risk lightly is likely to sell out, in the next crash, near the bottom.”

The investors first task, know your time horizon. If it’s less than 10-25 years, proceed into equity markets with due caution.

 

What to Do When Stocks are Pricey

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Insightful blog post by Carl Richards titled “You’re No Coward If You’re Keeping Some Money Out of Stocks”.

What should “some” be as a percentage? Conventional investment wisdom is subtract your age from 110 or 100 and invest that much in stocks.

Better yet, think about risk like Richards:

“You see, I hate losing money in investments that are outside my control. It ties me up in knots and distracts me from just about everything. So awhile ago, when I moved some money out of a 401(k) plan into my retirement account after a job change, I left it in cash.

I told myself that I was fine with missing out if the market continued to go up. But I wasn’t fine with investing this pile of cash just in time to get my head taken off in a big, scary market drop. And guess what? That was and still is true. So, I’m fine sitting in cash earning 0.16 percent or whatever the rate might be. I just don’t want to lose.

This decision has cost me in paper gains that I might have achieved, given how well the stock market has done since that decision, but I don’t care. I don’t see it as a real cost. Instead, I see it as an investment in my sanity and my human capital.

The fact that I didn’t have to worry about losing money in that area of my life allowed me to feel comfortable taking risks in other areas. I’ve started two or three new businesses and moved my family to New Zealand. The risks I have taken have provided, and will continue to provide, a much higher return than what I might have received if I remained fully invested in the markets.”

The Ultimate Personal Finance Challenge

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There are two types of investors, active and passive. Active investors are always educating themselves about personal finance; and paradoxically, tend to use passive funds, due to their lower fees and superior performance. In addition, they are purposeful in choosing a particular asset allocation and they monitor their progress regularly. They invest time and energy into increasing their wealth. I’m an active investor.

Passive investors, because they often think they’re not smart enough, often delegate to financial planners upon whom they depend for choosing particular investments and determining an asset allocation. Passive investors tend to end up with active funds with higher fees because they’re not paying very close attention.* They may not open their quarterly statements. Picture them falling asleep at the wheel of a semi-autonomous, financial planner driven car.

The most important thing I’ve learned in thirty years of investing is that there’s an undeniable point of diminishing returns when it comes to business smarts and investing success. Simply put, some of the most well-educated and successful business people I have ever known have made some of the worst investment decisions I have ever seen. And to add insult to injury, they’ve been unable to admit the error of their ways and reverse course. Too smart for their own good.

Personal finance research shows that once active investors master earning more than they spend, wire the difference into specific exchange traded funds monthly, and decide how best to balance bonds and stocks, additional trading detracts from their returns. Think of trading based on possible changes in the market as a “too smart for one’s own good” tax. Here’s one example.

Once you master earning more than you spend, wire the difference into specific exchange traded funds monthly, and decide how best to balance bonds and stocks, your ultimate personal finance challenge is doing nothing. Hence, consider my triumvirate of personal finance resolutions for 2017: 1) I will not be too smart for my own good. 2) I will not try to guess the market’s direction. 3) I will not trade. Or for the sake of additional research, you could guess and trade away and then we can compare returns in 11+ months.

* I hired an advisor in the early 1990s. Learned an expensive, but ultimately, invaluable lesson, no one cares nearly as much about your financial well-being as you do.

Sentence That Restores My Faith In “The Public”

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From today’s Wall Street Journal.

Investors pulled $12.7 billion from actively managed U.S. stock funds in 2014 through November, and put $244 billion into passive index funds from Vanguard and others, according to Morningstar.

Related factoid:

Vanguard is undercutting many rivals on fees. Investors pay 18 cents for every hundred dollars they invest with Vanguard, compared with $1.24 for the average actively managed mutual fund, Morningstar said. The company also is beating its passive rivals, which charge an average of 77 cents for every hundred dollars.

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