Category: Top 5

Top 5—Low-hanging fruit of financial management

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Most people want to increase their net worth.  The problem is that it’s not always easy.  Here is a look at the five “easiest ways” to increase your net worth, either by spending less, making more, or increasing your investments.

5.  Insurance: By definition, buying insurance is a money-losing proposition.  Insurance companies make money by relieving us of the financial risk of our lives.  And that’s fair. 

The problem is so often we make decisions on insurance at one stage of our lives and then “set it and forget it”.  After a few years, what was appropriate then might not be appropriate now.

A several years back Foxy and I got life insurance.  Based on our net worth and overall situation, it made sense.  Since then, our net worth has increased many fold, and if the EXTREMELY UNLIKELY event of our death happened, the survivors would be fine.  Is that worth $100 each month?

We picked the appropriate coverage on our car insurance four years ago.  Now our cars are four years older and worth substantially less.  Do we still need those levels of coverage today?  If the answer is “no” we could probably save another $30 per month.

4.  Revisit monthly expenses:  It’s easy to put your finances on auto-pilot as you make it through this crazy journey called life.  Yet, as fast as things are changing, especially technologically, it’s easy to have prices creep to too-high levels when you take your eye off the ball.

Our family has two cell phones (we refuse to cave in to getting our 10-year old a phone) and that costs about $60 per month.  Our internet is $35 per month. 

Yet, I can’t tell you how often I talk to families about their finances and expenses and when those items come up they’re paying two-, three-, four-times as much.  That’s not to say you should go without, but there are a lot of expenses where there are great alternatives at deep discounts from what you’re paying right now.

3.  Ask for a discount:  It’s amazing what we can get if we just ask.  I was working with a couple who had a pretty normal financial picture with pretty normal debts—car loans, mortgage on a second home, loan for a boat, student loans.

On a lark I suggested they call the various companies that held the loans and just ask if it was possible to get a lower rate.  Wouldn’t you know, they were told “yes” more often than “no”.  Sure, some places said no, but that happens.  The ones who said yes were able to offer better terms for the loans that amounted to hundreds of dollars in lower payments each month.  Who knew?

2. Balance transfer on credit cards:  Obviously having credit card debt is a bad thing and should be avoided at all costs.  If you do have credit card debt, eliminating that should be your top financial priority.

However, in the here and now, if you do have credit card debt that you’re working on paying off, getting a new credit card and transferring your balance could result in hundreds of dollars in savings on interest. 

Many cards offer 0% introductory rates for purchases or balance transfers.  Taking advantage of this could be a huge boost.  $10,000 of credit card debt at 20% rate is $170 for interest alone each month.  If you could take 20 minutes to apply for a new card with a teaser rate, that could save you a ton of money.

Of course, you still need to pay the debt off.  But doing so with an introductory rate can really help speed things along and save you a ton in the process.

1. Refinance your mortgage: Mortgages are often the largest expense that families have, yet it’s one of the easiest to impact.  Right now, mortgage rates are at historic lows. 

The Fox family just refinanced ours at 2.6%.  Many people could probably also get a lower rate, especially if you have a conforming mortgage (we don’t) or can swing a 15-year mortgage (we did 30).  Us going from 3.5% to 2.6% will save us about $500 per month for the next 30 years.  That adds up to some serious money.

Awesomely, the effort required to do this isn’t very much at all, especially compared to the upside.  With about 2-hours of internet searching, filling out forms, and talking to a few people, you can figure out if you can save money with a refinance.  If you can, then it’s probably 10 more hours of getting all the forms together and signing a bunch of stuff.  A dozen hours of work for an annuity worth hundreds of dollars a month is about as good as it gets.

Obviously there are the “meat-and-potatoes” way of increasing your savings.  Spend less.  But that requires a trade-off and sacrifice.  Here are some examples where hopefully that trade-off is the most painless.

Top 5: Things to do with your finances when you’re just starting out

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Love must be in the air. The past couple weekends I’ve run into a few young couples who either just got married or are about to get married.

It got me to thinking about what are the most important things to do in the world of personal finance when you are just getting started.  For the soon-to-be newlyweds, here is my Top 5 list:

5. Figure out your debt situation: If you’re lucky, you won’t have a lot (or any) debt.  For most of us there is some out there, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  List out every debt you have (student loan, mortgage, credit card, car payment, etc.), the balance, and the interest rate.

On a spreadsheet (see #4) rank them in order of interest rate.  As a general rule I use a cutoff of about 6%.  If your interest rate is above that pay those off right away, starting with the highest interest rate debt first.  If your interest rate is below that, that might be okay to keep that debt and just make the normal monthly payments.

If you have any debt (especially credit card debt) at any rate higher than 10%, that’s a “debt emergency”.  Really look at every purchase you make—if it’s not critical to your survival (food, shelter) then pass that up until your debt is paid off.  The only exception to this is #1—funding your 401k.

You can get creative with your debt by consolidating high interest rate cards onto a lower rate card or one that offers a low teaser rate.  That could save you a ton of money, and you should probably look into that, but ultimately, you’ll need to pay that sucker off.  So just hitting the grindstone of paying off your credit cards is a must.

4. Make a budget on a spreadsheet: Take a spreadsheet and put a quick budget together that includes your income, your expenses, and the difference between those two.  This can be simple at first (and it should be simple at first).  Over time, you’ll add more and more sheets to the spreadsheet for things like your mortgage, investments, kids’ education, and other things.

But at the beginning, you need to get a sense of where your money is going.  The budget will give you an aspirational view of this.  After your budget is done, you can track your spending with a website like mint.com.  This two-step process lets you figure where you want to spend your money, and then also look at where you actually spend it.

Of course, this is an iterative process, and as you close a month and look at your expenses, you can see if you’re spending more than what you budgeted.  This isn’t a time to beat yourself up (being too hard on yourself is a sure way to stop looking at your finances closely, and that’s a REALLY bad thing), but a time to ask yourself why you spent more and if it was worth it.

As an aside, using a spreadsheet is a really good skill in general.  I was really good at spreadsheets and it’s hard to overstate the incredible impact it had on my career, as well as the incredible wealth those skills gave me and my family.  And really, my experience with spreadsheets started in college when I was creating a financial budget.

3. Educate yourself on investing: At a young age, educate yourself on investing.  Obviously, this blog is the universally acknowledged best place to learn about investing, but I have heard rumors there are others.

www.mrmoneymustache.com is a great website that looks at personal spending and his early posts had a tremendous impact on my outlook.  A Random Walk Down Wall Street is a book on investing that really defined my investing strategy; I read that as a 19-year-old and still think about its insights today.

There are a lot of websites written by millennials about spending and personal finance that might resonate even more.  A few are: millennialmoneyman.com, moneypeach.com, and brokemillennial.com.  Most are about reducing spending and budgets and that sort of thing, but there are some on the nitty gritty of making investing choices.  You’ll want perspectives on both.

The whole point is that you need to know what you are doing here.  Spending 20 hours early in your life to figure out basics like asset allocation, tax avoidance, and fee minimization as well as a general attitude towards saving early can easily lead to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.  That comes to about $50,000 per hour—not bad.

2. Start an IRA with $1,000: This is as much about the experience gained as it is about actually investing your money.  Vanguard lets you start an IRA with $1,000 as the minimum amount.

You’ll navigate through their website, figure out how to make choices (like Roth or Traditional IRA—go traditional).  You’ll pick your investments, and then you’ll have something to look at every once in a while to see how it’s doing.

So many people are just at a total loss when it comes to setting up accounts for their investments.  That becomes a real problem once you hit 30 or 40 and you’re starting to get behind the 8-ball; you know you need to do something but are kind of clueless on where to start.  Doing it now lets you get your toes wet in this world and makes the next accounts you need to set up (529, 401k, brokerage, etc.) all the less daunting.

1. Get the company match on your 401k: #2 was more for experience than for investment.  Here is where you should start walking down the path for investments.  At a minimum, contribute the match and take the free money.

This is so important for a couple reasons.  First, you’re getting that free money.  Second, you’re making your first “asset allocation” decision.  When it comes time to pick which fund to invest in, unless you have very unique circumstances for an early-20s person, I would definitely go with a 100% equity index fund.

Third, your 401k is a really powerful tool.  If you had no other investing tool, you could still grow a 401k to well over a $1 million during your working career.  That is enough to fully fund your retirement.

BONUS—Stay poor:  Too many young adults make a huge mistake of trying to mimic the lifestyle their parents provided, once they (the young adults) get out of school.  That first paycheck of $2,000 is going to seem like a ton of money (and it is).  It’s really tempting to decide to buy a new car or go on a kickin’ vacation or upgrade the furniture.  Resist the urge.

Your parents took 25 or more years of working (with pay increases and investment returns) to provide the house and cars and vacations you enjoyed your senior year of high school.  It’s not realistic to think you can have stuff at that level of niceness so early.

A car is a really good example.  In general, automobiles are horrible investments.  To the degree you have a car that can get you from point A to point B, keep it.  A new car will be nice and cool and make your friends gawk, but it’s a horrible use of money.  A couple hundred dollars a month for a car, plus insurance, and maybe $50 for a gym membership, $50 for cable, and $80 for four dinners at a restaurant—those numbers add up.  Those alone could fund your savings in the early years.

Your early 20s are a time when it’s still okay not to have the best and nicest of everything.  If you can embrace that, even when you do have the money, and put that extra money to work in investments you’ll build a very strong financial foundation that will afford you many more opportunities are you reach your 30s and 40s (remember, I did that and I retired at 36).

Top 5 thoughts on the Covid stock market

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I know, I know.  I periodically test your patience by taking extended leaves from writing the blog.  I’ll use the excuse that everyone seems to be using right now: “Blame it on Covid.”  After almost two years of having to homeschool the cubs due to school shutdowns, I think I’m finally in the clear.

It has been a pretty wild year or so with so many things to talk about.  I’ll get to them in due course, but I wanted to cover what I think are the five most interesting/surprising/paradigm shifting thoughts that have emerged lately.

Here goes:

5.  US stocks are still the place to be.  Long time readers know each year I think about which stocks will do better, US or international.  Going back to 2013, US stocks have out performed international stocks.  Every year I think that this might be the year that international stocks turn the table and every year I’m wrong; US stocks come out on top.

A ton of people have written reams on this issue (me included), and there are a ton of complexities that I won’t attempt to cover here. 

But just looking at the numbers, US stocks have GREATLY outpaced the international stocks again.  In 2020, in the teeth of the corona virus and it’s impact on markets, US stocks were about 10% higher than international.  In 2021so far, it’s a similar story with US stocks about 12% higher.

This is certainly a curious phenomenon, and the stock market more than probably anything else forces reversion to the mean.  So we should expect international stocks to do better, but it certainly hasn’t happened yet.

4.  Covid gave us the greatest V recovery of all time.  Back in March of 2020, it was a crazy time for the stock market.  Things were in freefall, and we were comparing that market slide to some of the worst ever—the dot-com bust, the Great Recession, and the grandaddy of them all The Great Depression.

In the space of about 30 days, the stock market plummeted over 30%.  That’s crazy and steeper and faster than the Great Depression or the Great Recession.  At the time it was easy to think things could really go to hell.  Even the most optimistic (me included) thought we’d be in for a long recovery.

Yet, stocks completely recovered about four months later.  As crazy fast as the fall was, that recovery was even crazier and faster—totally without precedent.  Bear in mind, it took 25 years for stocks to recover after the Great Depression.  For the Great Recession it was five years.  This was four months.  Wow.

3. Politics don’t matter in finance as much as we think.  Last November Americans voted out President Donald Trump and elected President Joe Biden.  Obviously they are very different men with very different policies.

Yet, for all of that, and I’m really going to sound like a bitter old fox here (and maybe I am), has the country really changed all that much between the two administrations?  More to the point of this blog, has the stock market?  In the four years starting when Trump was elected the US stock market increased about 15% per year.  In the year since Biden got elected it’s increased about 35%.

Those are pretty heady numbers that speak to the fact that the US economy and publicly traded corporations are incredibly durable, despite what is happening in Washington.  A few years back I wrote a post to this very point; the stock market does great no matter who is in power and this is just the latest example.

2. Inflation.  This is probably the biggest unknown right now for the stock market.  Starting in April inflation crept up to about 5-6% and has been hovering there since.  This is a huge change from what has been a really long streak of exceptionally tame inflation.  Before this year, the highest inflation has been this millenium was back in 2008 when it hit 3.8%.  Now it’s over 2% more than that, and that’s a lot.  In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1982 to find a time when inflation was this high.

That’s all well and good, but what’s the “so what”?  All the official people are saying the inflation is temporary and it’s just a matter of the supply chain disruption kinks working their way out of the system like a snake eating a pig or something.  Of course, you’d expect President Biden and Jerome Powell and Janet Yellen to say that.  That sounds much better than: “Wow, we really screwed up and inflation is going to spiral out of control, so get ready for bad economic times like in the 1970s.”

We’ll see how this plays out.  If it’s temporary, then it won’t be a big deal.  However, if 5-6% becomes the new normal, that has HUGE implications on our personal finances.  We’ll see over the next several months.

1.  Innovation just keeps on trucking.  We know the stock market has done well, really well, through the corona virus.  There are a lot of things we can point to like government spending and such.  But I think it’s mostly just the meat and potatoes of the stock market—strong earnings driven by amazing innovation.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I mentioned five areas that I thought would really benefit from the changes.  Some of those were right and others not.  But the constant was that our incredible economy is thriving and innovating.

Just yesterday, Tesla stock rose to become the fifth company worth over a trillion dollars.  And that’s just driven by amazing innovation.  Same story with Apple and Amazon and a million others.  If you’re a stock owner, that’s made you rich.  If you’re a human, that’s made your life better.  We’re living in awesome times.

I hope you enjoyed this.  Did I get the list right?  Is there anything you think I missed?

Top 5: Future innovations that will make a killing in the stock market

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Welcome back to my Top 10 list of industries that will create new trillion dollar companies.  On Monday we covered 10 to 6 with: marijuana, fake meat, virtual reality, curing diabetes, and sport gambling.  If you didn’t read it, you may want to check it out.

On to the show.

5. Video conferencing:  This is another one of those things we see in science fiction movies all the time, but what we have today still falls flat.  Today’s technology isn’t always reliable, the cameras aren’t that good, they don’t follow the subject (center it), you have challenges with people talking over each other, and even slight delays make it a farce.

That’s a pretty big list of complaints but the potential is there.  Even with today’s very flawed offerings, you can see the promise.  And there is no question of the need.

When I was a consultant we had meetings about once per month that had maybe 40 people come together.  Let’s say half of them had to fly in.  Flights, hotels, meals while traveling come to about $2000.  Plus you have all the lost time.  To get there and back on a plane takes two days lets say.  If each person in that room makes $150,000, those two days, less the time of the 4 hour meeting is about $1000 each.  All said, just to have that meeting with everyone there face to face costs $60,000 or more. 

Once the technology gets there, you can have those meetings at a fraction of the cost.  Plus, as it becomes more convenient, you’ll have a lot more “face-to-face” calls instead of phone calls or emails.  Obviously communication is much more effective if you can do that rather than just have audio or text.

There’s a ton of money to be made here, and I don’t think we’re really that far away.  It’s just making it as streamlined and simple as making a phone call is today.

4. Online shopping:  Many will say this is already there—Amazon, anyone?  In fact, e-commerce only represents about 10% of retail. 

The big rocks I see changing in the next couple years are groceries and prescription medicine.  I know right now they’re there, but it seems pretty limited.  The Fox household cannot get online grocery delivery from Amazon.  We can’t even get it where we order groceries online and them pick them up from the closest Walmart.  So there’s room for improvement there.

Beyond that, especially as you start leveraging other advances (drone technology maybe, and VR #8) you can imagine a lot of other markets opening up.  If I was smarter I could tell you exactly what it would be.  However, with only 10% penetration, e-commerce has already made Amazon a trillion-dollar company.  As penetration drives to 20%, 30%, and on, there’s no reason to think it won’t spawn more trillionaires.

3. 3D printing:  This is a bit of a backwards technology—the solution came before there was a problem to solve.  At Medtronic in 2014 we got a 3D printer and everyone thought it was super cool but it didn’t do anything.  It was huge (about the size of a phone booth, cost $300,000, could only “print” in one material, and only a few of the guys in the machine shop knew how to use it.  Honestly I think the most use it got was making trinkets for the local elementary school who came to our facility for a field trip.

 This year I went to a “STEM in schools” conference and there was one for $2000 that could print in up to 4 different materials (different colors but all the same material).  Clearly the technology is advances.  Now it just needs that “killer app”.

Again, predicting the future is a good way to look foolish.  Long-term you could imagine a 3D printer “printing” food and body organs, but that’s Jetson’s stuff still probably decades off.  In the more short-term I think it can revolutionize some medical device industries like orthopedics (about $50 billion in annual revenue) and dental crowns ($10 billion), just to name two off the top of my head.  You could also imagine more mundane things like plumbers and construction guys always having the perfectly sized piece. 

2. Solar panels:  Our appetite for energy will only continue to increase.  As political forces curb fossil fuels, renewables like solar become an obvious solution.  Over the past few years, solar has definitely gained traction and grown a lot, but it’s still only about a billion-dollar industry.

What makes me optimistic is that the economics work.  We installed panels on our roof about 3 years ago, and they have a long-term return of about 4%.  Since then panels have gotten better AND cheaper, so a similar system today would cost about 10% less than we paid and generate about 10% more.  That pushes that return up to about 6-8%.  For a risk-free rate, that’s amazing.  Everyone should be doing this.

Also, what makes me optimistic is that there’s a ton of room for growth.  It struck me when I flew in Los Angeles.  On the approach you pass over about 50 miles of urban sprawl.  There’s millions of roofs, and only a small, small fraction have solar panels.  And that’s in LA where the political climate is so pro-solar that they require new buildings have solar panels.  If there’s that much opportunity in a place like LA, imagine the rest of the country and the world.

1. Self-driving cars:  This is the biggie.  Just goofing around with Mike, a loyal reader who predicted this as the #1, I thought this could generate $5 trillion in value.  Now I wonder if I underestimated that figure.  Realizing the dream of a fully-automated car has the potential to be as big an innovation as the personal computer or the internet, and those created a few trillion-dollar industries.

Where to start?  First it will allow the current automotive industry (currently about $1 trillion in annual revenues) to offer a product SIGNIFICANTLY better than available now.  There’s a ton of money to be made there.  If you’re willing to pay $25,000 for an Accord today, how much if that same car drove itself?  $40,000 or $50,000?  More?

There’ll also be a real estate boom.  Real estate just in Manhattan is worth about $2 trillion.  Let’s say 5% is dedicated to parking facilities—that $100 billion just in Manhattan that can get redeployed.  Extend that to every city in the world and your talking trillions. 

Also, there’ll be a boom because real estate in outlying areas will increase.  Today, let’s say a person is willing to commute up to an hour.  So communities that are over an hour away from where jobs are lose a lot of value.  If cars drive themselves, people will gladly commute longer because they aren’t driving, they’re just browsing on the internet or watching movies.  Those communities will drastically increase in value due to higher demand.  Imagine that across suburbia and you’re similarly talking trillions.

Plus roads will last longer because computers don’t drive like idiots they way people do.  Tires and other auto parts will last longer for the same reasons.  The auto insurance industry just in the US has about $300 billion in revenue and that will be turned on it’s head.

Oh, and there’s that little thing call humanity.  The 35,000 annual fatalities and 3 million injuries will fall dramatically.  That’s probably worth a couple trillion right there.

I could go on and on for these, and I am sure there are others that are equally promising.  The pint is the future of investing is bright.  There are going to be amazing companies that are going to continue to create amazing value for those who are invested.

Top 5: Personal finance lessons from A Game of Thrones

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SPOILERS WARNING

Between the gore and the incest, there are some valuable personal finances lessons from A Game of Thrones.  This Top 5 list is dedicated to ­­­­­­­all those who fell fighting for the living against the Night King.

5. Debt creeps up on you:  King Robert’s reign was a largely peaceful and prosperous one.  Yet like so many people, Robert overspent and went into debt.  It wasn’t any one thing and at first he really didn’t seem to notice.  However, before too long Robert was hamstrung by his debt, and it force him to make bad choices—the terrible marriage to Cersei being forced upon him since the Lannisters held most of his debt. 

That marriage to Cersei: we all know how that turned out for Robert.  Oops.

4. Everyone likes to look richer than they are:  Rather ironic based on #5, but by season 4 the Lannisters are broke.  Their gold mines stopped producing and they are deeply indebted to the Iron Bank.

Sounds pretty dire, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at them.  They are still “rich as a Lannister” and give the outward appearance that they are rolling in the gold dragons.  In no way do they let that they aren’t rich as ever, and why would they?  Who would want to show their rear end to others?

For rival houses who are trying to “keep up with the Lannisters” it becomes an impossible task. 

3. “How would we know we can’t fly unless we leap from some tall tower”:  Euron Greyjoy is one of the creepiest dudes in the series, but I love this line. 

Life is about taking on risk, understanding it, and making decisions that give you the most upside for the risk you take.  This is especially true with investing.

So many people are way too conservative with investing.  They don’t jump from that tall tower, or invest in equities that could lose money but historically do really, REALLY well.  Those “mistakes” in asset allocation can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The key is taking smart “leaps,” those where the rewards more than offset the risks.  Stocks definitely fall into that category.

2. “Power resides where people think it resides”:  Here Varys speaks one of the most important lines in the entire series. 

There’s probably no statement that describes our financial system better.  Banks work because people have think they work—you put your money in and you get it out.  Fiat currency is really just paper with colored ink, but they work because people think they can reliably use those pieces of paper to get other stuff.

The best, most recent example has been Bitcoin.  For a while people thought Bitcoin was really valuable so it went up to $19,000 (Dec 2017).  Then all the sudden people didn’t think it was valuable so it plunged down to $3200 (Dec 2018), and now it’s back up to $5300.  Nothing has really changed about its value or intrinsic net worth except what people think about its value.

1.   Being good at personal finance opens up A LOT of opportunities:  Littlefinger was my absolute favorite character, and he’s a great example of the power that comes with being really good with personal finances.

He started out as a nobody and rose to arguably the most important and richest person in the seven kingdoms.  How did he do it?  Investing well and being good with money.  He “had a gift for rubbing two golden dragons together and breeding a third.”

In our world financial literacy is abysmal.  Those who can master those skills can do quite well; the average salary for a financial planner is over $100,000.  Smart financial decisions can make a millionaire out of nearly anyone.  As Littlefinger shows, the sky’s the limit with this skillset.

Top 5 Reasons We’re in the Golden Age of Investing

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39Thegoldenage

You hear all the time that this is a terrible time to be an investor.  Maybe it’s after the fallout of some scandal, Enron and Worldcom from the early 2000s or Bernie Madoff from 2008 come to mind.  Or maybe it’s that the market is evolving and people caught on the wrong side of that start to complain.  A while back Michael Lewis published Flash Boys which looked at high frequency trading.  One of the takeaways was that Wall Street giants were rigging the game to their advantage at the cost of smaller investors.

flash boys

Of course, it wasn’t limited to Michael Lewis. We seem to be constantly barraged with stories about how investing is terrible now, the odds are stacked against the little guy, the fat cats are taking advantage of everyone.

I’m not an expert on high frequency trading or the million other death knells that people always point to when showing that the market is all screwed up.  The eternal optimist, I actually think this is a great time to be an investor.  Here are my top 5 reasons why we are in the golden age of investing.

5. Decimal stock prices: Today if you look up the price for a stock you get something normal looking like $40.63. However, before 2001, stock prices were quoted in fractions, so that same stock wouldn’t be $40.63, it would be 40⅝.  First off, that was a royal pain the butt.  Quick, which would cost more $20.30 or 20⅜? (20⅜ is more).  We all remember fractions from elementary school, but they aren’t really intuitive in financial applications.

Secondly, it cost you real money.  All stocks have a bid/ask spread which is the difference between what someone will sell something for and what they will buy it for.  That difference is the profit that market makers get.  As an investor you pay that spread, so the larger the spread the worse for you and the better for them.  When stocks were in fractions, just the nature of fractions made the spread fairly large.  So you might have an bid of 20⅜ and an ask of 20½.  That’s a spread of 12.5 cents for every share you trade.  That may not seem like a lot, but over hundreds or thousands of shares that starts to add up.

When stocks became decimalized, that 20⅜ became $20.38 and that 20½ became $20.50.  But then competition among market makers squeezed the spread to something like $20.41 and $20.42.  It’s not uncommon to see spreads of only a penny (see a recent quote I pulled up for Medtronic).  That is real savings that goes into your pocket.  In 2001 the SEC mandated all stocks be quoted in decimals and that was a real win-win: investing became computationally easier and less expensive.

Medtronic chart

4. Internet trading: You could have a whole post on how the internet has revolutionized personal finance (hmmmm, maybe I’ll do that). But here I’ll focus on internet trading and generally managing your investments online.  When I started investing in the mid-1990s the main way you invested was by calling your broker and having her execute the trades you wanted.

Think about that for a second.  You had to call someone, hope they answered, tell them what you wanted to do, and then have them do it.  That just seems really inefficient.  Later, some mutual fund companies got to the point where you could trade using your touch-tone phone (“press 1 to buy shares, press 2 to sell shares”), but even that was pretty kludgy.

Of course, once the internet came out, investing proved to be one of the ready-made applications for cyberspace.  You could actually see your investments on a screen, in real time, push buttons to do what you wanted.  Even set up things like automatic investments or withdraws.  No question, it’s so much easier now than it was.

3. Low costs: With the internet and the incredible efficiency it brought, the costs of investing plummeted. Brokerage fees on some of my first trades were in the $50-75 range.  That was with a full-service broker.  Also there were ways that they nickel-and-dimed you with things like “odd lot hikeys” which was an extra charge if you bought less than 100 shares.  Such a bunch of crap.

That was about the same time that “discount brokers” were becoming popular and started offering internet trades for $14.95.  Once that genie got out of the bottle, there was no end to how low trades could go, and it made sense.  All the stuff became automated, so the costs dwindled to almost nothing.  Now you can find $4.95 trades and places like Vanguard offer $2 trades if you know where to look.

Think about that for a second.  If you did 10 trades a year, in the old days (dang, that makes me sound old) that would have cost you $1500 per year (remember you get charged for buying and selling).  Over an investing career, that $1500 each year could add up to almost a quarter of a million dollars!!!  Maybe Michael Lewis will complain that investors are getting swindled out of a penny or two a share because of high-frequency traders, but that’s a drop in the bucket to what they’re saving by tiny, tiny trading costs.

2. Computing power: As reader Andrew H said in a comment, technology has advanced so rapidly that your iPhone has much, much more computing power than the Apollo 11 spacecraft. Computing technology has become amazing powerful and amazingly cheap in the past couple decades.  A $300 laptop with Excel can allow you to do amazingly large and complex analyses that would have seemed magical just 30 years ago.

One of the huge applications for this analytic power is personal finance and better understanding the stock market.  Many of my posts on this blog are just that—taking data and using Excel to make sense of stuff.  Are you better of investing a windfall at once or over time?  How often would you have lost money in the stock market historically?  Those are fairly large analyses that would have been a massive undertaking 30 years ago, probably only possible at a major investing house or a university.  Today, they’re done by a nerd with a cheap computer and too much time on his hands.

That computing power has been an amazing equalizer on the financial playing field.  Now individual investors can figure things out for themselves instead of having to listen to brokers like they were priests from some secretive cult.  That’s an enormous improvement.

1. Access to information: This is a biggie. The amount of information available to us now with the internet is mind-boggling.  When I was a kid your source of information on stocks and investing was the evening news (“stocks were up 52 points today”) and the newspaper where you could look up the price of a stock from the previous day.  That was it???  That was it!!!

Today you have real-time price quotes, you have real-time news, you have real-time analysis.  You also have troves of data, and nearly all of it is free.  All the analyses I have done is with free data on historic stock prices and inflation.  That’s nice if you’re a dork like me, but how does this help normal people?

In investing, information is power, and we live in a time where that power is freely given to all.  Let’s say you wanted to invest in Ford in 1990.  How would you go about researching your investment decision?  Maybe call Ford’s investor relations to have them mail you some annual reports, possibly go to the library to find some articles on the company, probably stored on microfiche.  That’s crazy.  Today you can find all that information plus about 1000 times more in less than 5 minutes on your computer.  It truly is a completely different ballgame, and one that is very much to our advantage compared to what it had been.

Bonus reason—financial understanding:  I couldn’t stop at five reasons, so I am including a sixth (the “Top 6” just doesn’t have the same ring).  There has been tremendous research into financial markets and how they behave over the last couple decades.  While markets are still very unpredictable by their nature, we understand them much better.  Ideas like price-to-earnings ratio, index mutual funds, efficient markets, and a thousand others help us better understand how and why the stock market does what it does and that allows us to be better investors.

In a similar vein, the central bankers who guide our economy, and by extension the stock market, have learned a lot too.  One of the theories on why the Great Depression was as bad as it was is because President Hoover and his advisors did all the wrong things.  It’s not that they were vindictive and wanted to drive the country into a calamitous financial train wreck, but they just didn’t know what to do.

I absolutely believe the reason we haven’t had another Great Depression, including the Great Recession where we emerged largely unscathed, is because our central bankers are a lot smarter.  Paul Volker, Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Janet Yellen, and now Jerome Powell all studied the Great Depression and other financial disasters and learned what those people did wrong and how similar fates can be avoided in the future.  That understanding has saved us a lot of pain.

So there you have it.  Sure, investing isn’t always a smooth path, and as Michael Lewis points out, there are always bad apples that are trying to screw things up.  But with all that, don’t lose sight of the fact that investing today is soooooooo much better than it has ever been before.

What do you think?  Are my glasses too rose-colored?  Are there other awesome developments that deserved a place in the top 5?

Top 5—investing moves when you’re just getting started

Stocky Leave a comment

My neighbor’s son, Rhino, just got engaged (I dubbed him rhino because the rhinoceros beetle is the strongest animal in the world pound-for-pound, and this kid is really strong).  We’ve gotten to Rhino over the years.  He was Mini and ‘Lil Fox’s first babysitter when we moved into the neighborhood, so of course he has a special place in our hearts.

We were talking about his engagement, starting out life, and obviously since it’s a conversation with me, how to do the right things financially.

It got me to thinking about what are the most important things to do in the world of personal finance when you are just getting started.  For the soon-to-be newlyweds, here is my Top 5 list:

 

5. Figure out your debt situation: If you’re lucky, you won’t have a lot (or any) debt.  For most of us there is some out there, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  List out every debt you have (student loan, mortgage, credit card, car payment, etc.), the balance, and the interest rate.

On a spreadsheet (see #4) rank them in order of interest rate.  As a general rule I use a cutoff of about 6%.  If your interest rate is above that pay those off right away, starting with the highest interest rate debt first.  If your interest rate is below that, that might be okay to keep that debt and just make the normal monthly payments.

If you have any debt (especially credit card debt) at any rate higher than 10%, that’s a “debt emergency”.  Really look at every purchase you make—if it’s not critical to your survival (food, shelter) then pass that up until your debt is paid off.  The only exception to this is #1—funding your 401k.

You can get creative with your debt by consolidating high interest rate cards onto a lower rate card or one that offers a low teaser rate.  That could save you a ton of money, and you should probably look into that, but ultimately, you’ll need to pay that sucker off.  So just hitting the grindstone of paying off your credit cards is a must.

 

4. Make a budget on a spreadsheet: Take a spreadsheet and put a quick budget together that includes your income, your expenses, and the difference between those two.  This can be simple at first (and it should be simple at first).  Over time, you’ll add more and more sheets to the spreadsheet for things like your mortgage, investments, kids’ education, and other things.

But at the beginning, you need to get a sense of where your money is going.  The budget will give you an aspirational view of this.  After your budget is done, you can track your spending with a website like mint.com.  This two-step process lets you figure where you want to spend your money, and then also look at where you actually spend it.

Of course, this is an iterative process, and as you close a month and look at your expenses, you can see if you’re spending more than what you budgeted.  This isn’t a time to beat yourself up (being too hard on yourself is a sure way to stop looking at your finances closely, and that’s a REALLY bad thing), but a time to ask yourself why you spent more and if it was worth it.

As an aside, using a spreadsheet is a really good skill in general.  I was really good at spreadsheets and it’s hard to overstate the incredible impact it had on my career, as well as the incredible wealth those skills gave me and my family.  And really, my experience with spreadsheets started in college when I was creating a financial budget.

 

3. Educate yourself on investing: At a young age, educate yourself on investing.  Obviously, this blog is the universally acknowledged best place to learn about investing, but I have heard rumors there are others.

www.mrmoneymustache.com is a great website that looks at personal spending and his early posts had a tremendous impact on my outlook.  A Random Walk Down Wall Street is a book on investing that really defined my investing strategy; I read that as a 19-year-old and still think about its insights today.

There are a lot of websites written by millennials about spending and personal finance that might resonate even more.  A few are: millennialmoneyman.com, moneypeach.com, and brokemillennial.com.  Most are about reducing spending and budgets and that sort of thing, but there are some on the nitty gritty of making investing choices.  You’ll want perspectives on both.

The whole point is that you need to know what you are doing here.  Spending 20 hours early in your life to figure out basics like asset allocation, tax avoidance, and fee minimization as well as a general attitude towards saving early can easily lead to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.  That comes to about $50,000 per hour—not bad.

 

2. Start an IRA with $1,000: This is as much about the experience gained as it is about actually investing your money.  Vanguard lets you start an IRA with $1,000 as the minimum amount.

You’ll navigate through their website, figure out how to make choices (like Roth or Traditional IRA—go traditional).  You’ll pick your investments, and then you’ll have something to look at every once in a while to see how it’s doing.

So many people are just at a total loss when it comes to setting up accounts for their investments.  That becomes a real problem once you hit 30 or 40 and you’re starting to get behind the 8-ball; you know you need to do something but are kind of clueless on where to start.  Doing it now lets you get your toes wet in this world and makes the next accounts you need to set up (529, 401k, brokerage, etc.) all the less daunting.

 

1. Get the company match on your 401k: #2 was more for experience than for investment.  Here is where you should start walking down the path for investments.  At a minimum, contribute the match and take the free money.

This is so important for a couple reasons.  First, you’re getting that free money.  Second, you’re making your first “asset allocation” decision.  When it comes time to pick which fund to invest in, unless you have very unique circumstances for an early-20s person, I would definitely go with a 100% equity index fund.

Third, your 401k is a really powerful tool.  If you had no other investing tool, you could still grow a 401k to well over a $1 million during your working career.  That is enough to fully fund your retirement.

 

BONUS—Stay poor:  Too many young adults make a huge mistake of trying to mimic the lifestyle their parents provided, once they (the young adults) get out of school.  That first paycheck of $2,000 is going to seem like a ton of money (and it is).  It’s really tempting to decide to buy a new car or go on a kickin’ vacation or upgrade the furniture.  Resist the urge.

Your parents took 25 or more years of working (with pay increases and investment returns) to provide the house and cars and vacations you enjoyed your senior year of high school.  It’s not realistic to think you can have stuff at that level of niceness so early.

A car is a really good example.  In general, automobiles are horrible investments.  To the degree you have a car that can get you from point A to point B, keep it.  A new car will be nice and cool and make your friends gawk, but it’s a horrible use of money.  A couple hundred dollars a month for a car, plus insurance, and maybe $50 for a gym membership, $50 for cable, and $80 for four dinners at a restaurant—those numbers add up.  Those alone could fund your savings in the early years.

Your early 20s are a time when it’s still okay not to have the best and nicest of everything.  If you can embrace that, even when you do have the money, and put that extra money to work in investments you’ll build a very strong financial foundation that will afford you many more opportunities are you reach your 30s and 40s (remember, I did that and I retired at 36).

Top 5 investing highlights from 2018

Stocky 1 Comment

We’re all getting used to me going for extended periods without writing a blog post.  I’m sorry about that, but I’ve had a consulting job for the past couple months that has been keeping me busy.  It’s starting to wind down, so I should have more time to consistently write posts.  As always, thank you for sticking with me.

 

Wow!!!  It’s been a crazy few months in the stock market since I’ve been gone.  I figured for my first blog back I would give you my list of the craziest/most interesting things to happen in the investing world the past few months.  Some of these deserve their own post, so we can dive deeper into those in future posts.

Without further adieu, here are my Top 5 investing highlights since April:

 

5. Interest rates on the rise: 2018 has been the year of the interest rate increase by the Fed. In response to the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed cut interest rates to nearly 0%.  There they stayed for nearly the entire 8 years of the Obama administration.  It was only in December of 2015 that the interest rate was raised to 0.5%.

Since 2015, there have been 7 rate increases (including 3 so far in 2018), bringing the Fed rate to 2.25%.  This stuff makes finance nerds giddy, but it does have real-life impacts on the rest of us.

I think the biggest direct impact is that mortgage rates have started to go up.  Now a 30-year fixed mortgage is at about 5%.  A couple years back it was at 3.5%.  That’s a major change that could mean hundreds of dollars per month on a families mortgage.  This impact stretches to housing affordability (gets worse) and number of families refinancing (goes down).

 

4. Massive tax law passes: I know the big tax law passed in December 2017, but I feel a lot of the ramifications hit in 2018. By mid-year it seemed the impact was starting to hit the market—GDP growth was higher than it had been in a really long time, unemployment was lower, and because of the low unemployment inflation had kicked higher.

The immediate impact of the tax break had a major boost to the markets in late December and early January.  Then there was a huge market drop in late January and early February.  However, it seemed that the benefits of the tax breaks (higher GDP, lower unemployment) started boosting stock, with the US markets hitting all-time highs in September.

Obviously, since September stocks have been on a major slide, but we’ll leave that for reason #1.

 

3. US elections in November: Politics are different from investing, but obviously they are connected. The soap opera that is Washington DC hit a fever pitch on November 6, with an unusually high amount of drama for a off-election.

Republicans increased their majority in the Senate, while Democrats gained enough seats in the House of Representatives to take over that chamber of Congress.  The headline was obviously that the US would have a split government for the next two years.

Pundits spent innumerable hours debating the impact split government would have on the nation broadly and the investing markets in particular.  The common thinking is that split government is a good thing in that government can’t make major changes, giving some level of predictability for business.  I tend to agree with that.  In fact, when you look at the data, the stock market does best with a split government.

In case you were curious, the market was up 2.1% the day after the elections, so clearly the markets liked the outcome of the election.

 

2. America is #1: I had a blog on this a while back, but I’m still fascinated by this phenomenon. As of now, US stocks are down 2.2% for the year while international stocks are down 14.2%.  That’s a 12% difference!!!  That’s huge!!!

Curiously, they stayed fairly coorelated all the way through April.  Then, starting in May, they really began to diverge.

The reasons aren’t entirely known.  Many people have many opinions, and I imagine this will be examined for years.  However, my belief is it’s a combination of the US winning the trade wars, China’s economy slowing down, and Europe figuring out Brexit and the future of the EU.

Who knows if I’m right or wrong.  But certainly this is interesting.

 

1. The rollercoaster that is the stock market: It has been a wild ride all of 2018.

January started out on fire, then the stock market took a huge dump in February, rallied towards the end of the month, fell again in March, then plodded out a 8-month upward march that peaked in September, and has since fallen to its current levels.

Those a 6 distinct moves, all of which are major.  I’ve talked about how I think volatility is becoming more inherent in the market, so I think that’s a piece of it.  But the change of directions this dramatic is definitely an unusual twist.

And we still have a month to go.  Stay tuned.

Top 5—investing moves when you’re just getting started

Stocky Leave a comment

A week ago, my Uncle Lynx passed away.  At the funeral I was chatting with some distant family members (my cousin’s wife’s nephew).  He and his wife are a super cute couple.  They are in their early 20s and just getting started on this crazy journey called adulthood.

As we were chatting, the subject veered towards personal finance (me talking about personal finance . . . imagine that).  This couple’s ears perked up and then seemed genuinely interested; I suppose it’s possible they were just really polite, but I think it was something more.

It got me to thinking about what are the most important things to do in the world of personal finance when you are just getting started.  Here is my Top 5 list:

 

5. Figure out your debt situation: If you’re lucky, you won’t have a lot (or any) debt.  For most of us there is some out there, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  List out every debt you have (student loan, mortgage, credit card, car payment, etc.), the balance, and the interest rate.

On a spreadsheet (see #4) rank them in order of interest rate.  As a general rule I use a cutoff of about 6%.  If your interest rate is above that pay those off right away, starting with the highest interest rate debt first.  If your interest rate is below that, that might be okay to keep that debt and just make the normal monthly payments.

If you have any debt (especially credit card debt) at any rate higher than 10%, that’s a “debt emergency”.  Really look at every purchase you make—if it’s not critical to your survival (food, shelter) then pass that up until your debt is paid off.  The only exception to this is #1—funding your 401k.

You can get creative with your debt by consolidating high interest rate cards onto a lower rate card or one that offers a low teaser rate.  That could save you a ton of money, and you should probably look into that, but ultimately, you’ll need to pay that sucker off.  So just hitting the grindstone of paying off your credit cards is a must.

 

4. Make a budget on a spreadsheet: Take a spreadsheet and put a quick budget together that includes your income, your expenses, and the difference between those two.  This can be simple at first (and it should be simple at first).  Over time, you’ll add more and more sheets to the spreadsheet for things like your mortgage, investments, kids’ education, and other things.

But at the beginning, you need to get a sense of where your money is going.  The budget will give you an aspirational view of this.  After your budget is done, you can track your spending with a website like mint.com.  This two-step process lets you figure where you want to spend your money, and then also look at where you actually spend it.

Of course, this is an iterative process, and as you close a month and look at your expenses, you can see if you’re spending more than what you budgeted.  This isn’t a time to beat yourself up (being too hard on yourself is a sure way to stop looking at your finances closely, and that’s a REALLY bad thing), but a time to ask yourself why you spent more and if it was worth it.

As an aside, using a spreadsheet is a really good skill in general.  I was really good at spreadsheets and it’s hard to overstate the incredible impact it had on my career, as well as the incredible wealth those skills gave me and my family.  And really, my experience with spreadsheets started in college when I was creating a financial budget.

 

3. Educate yourself on investing: At a young age, educate yourself on investing.  Obviously, this blog is the universally acknowledged best place to learn about investing, but I have heard rumors there are others.

www.mrmoneymustache.com is a great website that looks at personal spending and his early posts had a tremendous impact on my outlook.  A Random Walk Down Wall Street is a book on investing that really defined my investing strategy; I read that as a 19-year-old and still think about its insights today.

There are a lot of websites written by millennials about spending and personal finance that might resonate even more.  A few are: millennialmoneyman.com, moneypeach.com, and brokemillennial.com.  Most are about reducing spending and budgets and that sort of thing, but there are some on the nitty gritty of making investing choices.  You’ll want perspectives on both.

The whole point is that you need to know what you are doing here.  Spending 20 hours early in your life to figure out basics like asset allocation, tax avoidance, and fee minimization as well as a general attitude towards saving early can easily lead to hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.  That comes to about $50,000 per hour—not bad.

 

2. Start an IRA with $1,000: This is as much about the experience gained as it is about actually investing your money.  Vanguard lets you start an IRA with $1,000 as the minimum amount.

You’ll navigate through their website, figure out how to make choices (like Roth or Traditional IRA—go traditional).  You’ll pick your investments, and then you’ll have something to look at every once in a while to see how it’s doing.

So many people are just at a total loss when it comes to setting up accounts for their investments.  That becomes a real problem once you hit 30 or 40 and you’re starting to get behind the 8-ball; you know you need to do something but are kind of clueless on where to start.  Doing it now lets you get your toes wet in this world and makes the next accounts you need to set up (529, 401k, brokerage, etc.) all the less daunting.

 

1. Get the company match on your 401k: #2 was more for experience than for investment.  Here is where you should start walking down the path for investments.  At a minimum, contribute the match and take the free money.

This is so important for a couple reasons.  First, you’re getting that free money.  Second, you’re making your first “asset allocation” decision.  When it comes time to pick which fund to invest in, unless you have very unique circumstances for an early-20s person, I would definitely go with a 100% equity index fund.

Third, your 401k is a really powerful tool.  If you had no other investing tool, you could still grow a 401k to well over a $1 million during your working career.  That is enough to fully fund your retirement.

 

BONUS—Stay poor:  Too many young adults make a huge mistake of trying to mimic the lifestyle their parents provided, once they (the young adults) get out of school.  That first paycheck of $2,000 is going to seem like a ton of money (and it is).  It’s really tempting to decide to buy a new car or go on a kickin’ vacation or upgrade the furniture.  Resist the urge.

Your parents took 25 or more years of working (with pay increases and investment returns) to provide the house and cars and vacations you enjoyed your senior year of high school.  It’s not realistic to think you can have stuff at that level of niceness so early.

A car is a really good example.  In general, automobiles are horrible investments.  To the degree you have a car that can get you from point A to point B, keep it.  A new car will be nice and cool and make your friends gawk, but it’s a horrible use of money.  A couple hundred dollars a month for a car, plus insurance, and maybe $50 for a gym membership, $50 for cable, and $80 for four dinners at a restaurant—those numbers add up.  Those alone could fund your savings in the early years.

Your early 20s are a time when it’s still okay not to have the best and nicest of everything.  If you can embrace that, even when you do have the money, and put that extra money to work in investments you’ll build a very strong financial foundation that will afford you many more opportunities are you reach your 30s and 40s (remember, I did that and I retired at 36).

BOOM—Top 5 impressions of Dow’s 1150 free fall

Stocky 1 Comment

Yowza.  Yesterday was a crazy day.  There’s an ancient Chinese saying: “you are lucky to live in interesting times.”  Definitely the past couple days the stock market has been interesting.

Yesterday I got cocky and wrote a post on the 666 point fall on Friday.  I was a bit aloof, and the investing gods love nothing more than to humble people like that.  So in a weird way, I take some of the responsibility for the 1175 point drop yesterday.

Seriously though, let’s take a look at what’s going on.  Here are my Top 5 impressions of what happened, and what it all means.

 

  1. Biggest point drop in a day

Yesterday’s 1175 point drop for the Dow was the largest of all time.  Living in interesting times, right?  But at a 4.1% decrease (I’m going to be using S&P 500 for percentages just because it’s a broader market and the data is easier to get), yesterday was about the 30th biggest drop since 1950.

A top 30 (or bottom 30 depending on how you want to look at it) is notable given there have been over 17,000 trading days since 1950.  However, top 30 means that on average, something like this happens about every other year or so.  Maybe not so special.

Remember the last time we had a drop this big?  Of course you don’t.  In August of 2011 there was a -4.5%.  Actually, August 2011 was a crazy month—there were FOUR days with percentage drops greater than the one we had yesterday.  Think about that for a second.  The month of August 2011 was a major rollercoaster with a lot of ups and downs.  Stocks were down 5.7% for the month.  But we don’t remember that at all because it was just a blip.  Just.  A.  Blip.

That’s how I think we’ll remember this one.  There are never guarantees, but this stuff happens all the time in investing during your 60+ year investing career.  Get used to it.

 

  1. See the horrors of automated trading

Look closely at the daily chart right around 3pm.  It took a super-steep nosedive, at that point falling to about 1500 points.  But then, nearly as quickly it recovered about 500 points.  That a huge swing in about 10 minutes.

What caused that: Automated trading.  Computers saw all the selling around them and were programmed to sell too.  However, what should be very comforting is that humans (and other computers with different programming) saw that and realized that the selling was overdone.  They stepped in and started buying.

Computer algorithms are a newer phenomenon in the market.  I did a post of how they lead to much more volatility (written the last time the market went really crazy).  However, while volatility may rise, it really doesn’t have any long-term impact on returns.

But the lesson here is realizing that a lot of what goes on is driven by thoughtless, emotionless computers that don’t really realize if there is an “overreaction”.  As a human who has perspective, that means you can keep your cool when that stupid machine thinks it’s all going to hell.

 

  1. How bad are things really?

This is important.  What has fundamentally changed since a week ago when stocks were at an all-time high?

Really not much.  There was a jobs report that showed wages had crept up a bit.  On top of that Janet Yellen has stepped down as Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, and is being replaced by Jerome Powell.   Yellen was seen as fairly dovish on inflation, tending to keep rates lower for longer to spur higher employment.  Powell is a bit more hawkish and is seen as more likely to raise rates more quickly to fight inflation.  That goes to the whole thing we were talking about with the Fed yesterday.

Beyond that, which I think is a bit of a Red Herring, there aren’t any fundamental economic problems that are causing this.  In 2008 the mortgage crises exposed the rotten foundation of the banking industry; in 2001 the internet bubble popped and exposed massive accounting frauds; in the 1970s OPEC exercised considerable cartel power (something that I wrote about here as unlikely to occur again).

That’s a quick rundown of all the major stock market disasters of the past 60 years.  I don’t think there are any fundamental issues like that which we are uncovering to cause that to happen now.  Rather, while we remember those three listed above, just like August 2011 there are a dozen mini-disasters that turned out to be much bigger bark than bite.  I think that’s what we’ll have here.

 

  1. What I think is going to happen

Making predictions on the stock market is a sure way to look stupid, but I’ll do it anyway.

I think we’re definitely in for a wild month.  I bet today (Tuesday 6-Feb-2018) the market will be up 200 points, then down 300 and another 500 the next two days.  We’ll have a ton of volatility for the rest of the month, and we’ll end February down 4.8%.  For the year, I will stick with my prediction from December 2017, and I think we’ll be up 5%.

What am I basing that on?  A lot of gut, and that’s never a good thing.  The market has had an unprecedented run.  These things can’t last forever, and the market does take “breathers” (sometimes called corrections).  I think that’s what we’re going through right now.

However, the fundamentals are strong.  The tax break is a big boon.  Even more important, the tax break and a lot of other things are spurring innovation.  Money is being deployed in R&D instead of sitting in banks in Ireland and Switzerland.

Being as involved as I am in the medical device space, I know tremendous innovation is happening.  Diabetes is on the brink of being cured by Medtronic; bear in mind in the US we spend about $250 billion (read that again, a quarter TRILLION) to treat that.  Think of all the benefits that will follow.  Also we’re on the brink of having driverless cars which that alone will create well over a trillion dollars in sales and societal benefit.  Those are just two of probably a dozen you could rattle off.  Bottom line, I think things are really good right now.

 

  1. How this should impact your portfolio

It shouldn’t.  Definitely this shouldn’t scare you off into selling your portfolio.  There’s a famous saying in the stock market that says “You should be scared when others are greedy, and you should be greedy when others are scared.”

A week ago stocks were flying high and everyone was greedy.  As it turns out we should have been scared, but hindsight is 20/20.  Now that everyone is scared, we should be greedy.

That said, I wouldn’t try to time the market either.  A friend, Mr Snow Leopard, has a bit of cash sitting on the sideline and we were chatting about this and what to do.  I said if it was me, I would invest in equal installments over the next three or so months.  I know that goes against my analysis on how to invest a windfall, but I think things are so crazy right now, I wouldn’t feel comfortable putting all the chips in on one hand.  I’m going with my heart over my head, but oh well.

I think we’ll definitely be in for a rocky ride and I think there are going to be a few of these really good buying opportunities interspersed with glimpses of optimism.  Either way, DEFINITELY DON’T PANIC AND SELL OUT.