Current Events
Mike discusses current events and how they could be affecting your investments - or more likely, your perception.
-
Change Is Difficult
The question is this: does the value you are receiving now justify staying put. After all, change is usually difficult. Have you really evaluated what value you are receiving right now? Do you remember Harry Truman: not President Truman, but Harry Randall Truman? Harry Truman lived on the south end of Spirit Lake at the base of Mount St. Helens. He had owned and operated a recreation and fishing lodge for decades. He called the mountain his friend and claimed a deep relationship with it. He had watched the puffs of ash and had become an expert in the earthquakes. Those tremors had become more frequent in 1979 and 1980.…
-
SHOW ME THE MONEY!
One of the most famous movie quotes comes from Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money”. In my industry, I hear so many stories about making money in stocks that make me want to shout at the teller “Show me the money!” I want the authors or story tellers to show me their strategy really works. Recently, I received a new white paper from Northern Trust that was titled “Getting Paid to Lower Your Risk”.[1] The authors were credentialed (PhD and CFAs); These are intelligent people. I wanted to see how Northern Trust was paying their clients to lower their risk. I custody my client accounts at Interactive Brokers, who started…
- 401ks, Adams Financial Concepts, COVID-19, Current Events, Financial Planning, Return on Investment, The Investment Industry
Are You Ready?
Did you know the standard railroad gauge in the U.S. is 4 feet 8 ½ inches? Do you know why it is such an odd measure? Railroads in the United States were built by British expatriates who designed them the same way that rail lines were built in England. Engineers in Britain based the width of their railroads on the spacing of tramways which had preceded railroads. They built the trams with the same jigs and tools used for building wagons. The wagons were built to that width so they would fit the road ruts in medieval England which were based on road ruts in Imperial Rome, which were in…
-
Clouds on the Horizon
Right now I am beginning to feel like the guy who jumped off the 50 story building. Half way down someone yells, “How are you doing?” “So far, so good.” While the S&P 500 is within ten percent of the end of last year and my clients are even with the end of last year, there are dark clouds forming. Will they blow over, dump some rain, cause a downpour, or turn into a thunderstorm? Will COVID-19 infections continue up? Will the government stimulus run out? With spending way down, how does that affect the overall economic outlook? What is China doing? How close are we to a vaccine? Those…
- Adams Financial Concepts, COVID-19, Current Events, Financial Planning, Return on Investment, The Investment Industry
The Economy: BC to AC
It’s time to talk about BC to AC. That is, “Before Coronavirus” to “After Confinement”. The Economist calls it “the 90% economy”.[1] But first, let me take you back in time to give you an example of what may well be in store for some companies in the future. There was a junior clerk at Rochester Savings Bank in 1878 who decided to take a trip to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. This young man wanted to record his trip by photographing it, however, the camera in 1878 was huge, required a tripod to hold perfectly steady, and the picture was recorded on a heave plate that had to…
-
Oil 2020
What would you say if someone offered to pay you $37,000 to just take one single contract for 1,000 barrels of oil? All you had to do is find a place to store it. That actually happened a week ago. All you had to do was figure out where to put ten tanker trucks of oil until the market got better, and you would have been paid to take custody of the oil. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that demand for oil fell off a cliff. Airlines were cancelling flights and leaving their planes on the ground. People were being ordered to stay home and shelter, and…
-
When Is the Best Time to Sell?
When is the time to sell and liquidate portfolios? Most advisors, according to a recent study by Howard Schneider of Practical Perspectives[1], says most advisors have seen little impact from the stay at home orders and they perceive the market will return to normal in six months. I have considerable concern. Yes, I am staying the course today and am optimistic that we will be back to normal by the end of this year. But I am not blindly staying the course. Usually, I try to accomplish at least five tasks every day. On March 12th, I spent the entire day on one task and that was to determine when…
-
What Just Happened?
On Friday, the DOW fell 361 points and then yesterday the DOW gained 1,627 points. That is a sign that the market probably bottomed on March 23 and is beginning a climb back to new highs. It is a pattern that we have seen before. Let me give you the explanation of why I say this. The easiest illustration is Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the DOW plunged 508 points – 22.6% in one day. People remember Black Monday, but what might have been more important was April 20, 1987. When the markets fall like they did on Black Monday, or over several days in March 2020, almost all…
-
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THIS MARKET SELLOFF
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. I believe there are lessons to be learned from a previous time when the market, during a good economic time, plunged to the worst down day percentagewise in market history. It was the first time that the market plunge spread internationally to the world’s stock markets. There are lessons to be learned from Black Monday back on October 19, 1987. On that day, the market plunged down over 22%! Black Monday is remembered as the worst market drop in history, but it was October 20, 1987 that had the potential to collapse the entire financial system. There is an old saying: “for…
-
2020: DOW Down 2,000
Hello 2018. Yes, 2018, not 2008. The drop has been sharper, but it feels the same. Computers panicked! This drop has been caused by panicked computers, not humans. Between 60 and 70 percent of all stock trades on normal days are made by computers. They can read the news in a fraction-of-a-second, and they have a list of rules on what is good news and what is bad. When the news falls into “bad” parameters, the computers sell. They don’t just sell once, but many times, and they make money on fractions-of-a-dollar, and then cover their sales a short time later – wash, rinse, repeat. The algorithms are not built…