A common theme in news articles I have been reading is the idea that the market is in a euphoric period. There is certainly some euphoria around newly minted Robinhood traders and investors of Tesla and Bitcoin, but is the main street investor euphoric? I’m not so sure. I don’t know about you, but the other investors I am talking to are feeling far from euphoric. They seem to be… Read More
Real Return Is All That Matters
Many pundits and market experts (if there is such a thing) have been forecasting below average market returns for a couple of years now. Interestingly, since this started becoming a “thing” around 2018, the market returned 31% in 2019 and 18% in 2020. It’s not important to the topic of this post, I just think it’s funny. The idea that future returns will be lower is widely accepted. I’m not… Read More
The 2020 Lessons of “Let’s Wait and See”
2020 offered two particularly abject lessons on why “Let’s wait and see.” is almost always a terrible strategy. COVID. The presidential election. “Let’s wait and see.” can take many forms. “I just want to get out because of the uncertainty of (insert scary event). Once things calm down and return to normal, we’ll get back in.” Statements like this typically follow a period of market decline or when there is… Read More
Nobody Saw This Coming, Part Two
Last year around this time, I wrote a post titled, Nobody Saw This Coming about the performance of the markets in 2019 when it surprised everyone. Then 2020 came along and said, “Hold my beer.” Nobody saw the global pandemic coming. Nobody could have presumed global shutdowns. Nobody saw a 34% decline over 33 days. In part, because that combination of things had never happened during the life of anyone… Read More
The Ultimate Retirement Lever
There are plenty of technical planning topics that can add value to your financial life that range from tax optimization to long-term care planning to estate planning. But if you blow up your portfolio, each one of those planning areas is exponentially worse off which is why I write so much about the simple value of staying the course through all markets. Imagine that around March 23rd of this year,… Read More
Who Would’ve Thought?
On 24 November, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closed above 30,000 for the first time ever. In case you’ve forgotten, on March 23rd, the DJIA closed at 18,214. This is a rebound of about 65% in a period of about eight months’ time. Let’s also not forget how loud the doomsayers had become in their war chant of “this is the end of the world as we know it.”… Read More
Today’s Headlines Are Tomorrow’s Footnotes
I have been reading a collection of investment articles that were written back in the early 1990s. Here’s the gist of those articles. The bull market had gone on for about 10+ years to that point. The markets were coming off of a five-year span of ‘unprecedented volatility’ as was noted a few times. There were negative reports everywhere about the economy and how things were stalling out. People eagerly… Read More
Are You Worrying About the Right Thing?
The most frequently asked question right now is how the presidential election is going to impact the stock market. What is really being asked is, “Should I sell out now and get back in later?” Who knows what is going to happen in the market… Here’s what we do know. While everyone continues to ask the question about how overvalued the market is and how volatile it might be over… Read More
The Enduring Reason for Optimism
I received some feedback from my post last week, Pessimism Abounds, regarding whether or not I am just wearing rose-colored glasses given the state of the world. It’s hard to argue with the state of the world argument in any kind of an immediate time frame. As I was receiving this feedback, I received the following quote from Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic email, which I highly recommend by the way…. Read More
Pessimism Abounds
With the hyper-partisan election in front of us and the COVID-inspired economic drawdown in our rearview, I find myself returning over and over again to the same question: “Is it possible that we are both too pessimistic in the short-term and too pessimistic about the long-term prospects of the market?” I’m not saying that we are, I’m just asking the question of whether it’s possible? Since 2008, I can think… Read More
