Current Events
Mike discusses current events and how they could be affecting your investments - or more likely, your perception.
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Four Truths No Matter Who Wins the Election
There are dozens of pundits and talking heads making claims about what happens to the stock market depending upon who wins the 2020 Presidential Election. Some claims are outrageous. Some claims are fantasy. Some claims are straight-up weird. So, what should investors make of all this? Here are four truths I believe will hold no matter who wins the election. 1. The stock markets have done well under both Democrat and Republican Presidents. I realize some of the presidential terms have been eight years and, in the case of Presidents Ford and Trump, less than four years in length. But the point is this: stock markets have done well under…
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Why the Market Drop?
You’ve heard the expression “The market is telling us … [fill in the blank]”. The reality is that the market cannot talk, cannot do a ZOOM meeting, cannot send us an email. It is not the market talking, it is the investors – human investors and computer algorithms. To understand why this market drop I believe it begins with the process. When you buy a stock, you buy it with the expectation that it will rise in value. When you sell short a stock, you sell with the expectation the stock price will sink. Financial companies and institutions hire analysts whose job is to forecast future revenues and income. They…
- Adams Financial Concepts, COVID-19, Current Events, Financial Planning, Mile High View, Return on Investment, The Investment Industry
Is It Luck or Skill?
Doesn’t it make you feel comfortable to live in an orderly and predictable world? Isn’t that especially true when it comes to investments? Haven’t you heard that the markets do not like uncertainty? But isn’t it also true that the only constant in the world is change? In spite of that, our human brains have evolved to downplay the role of luck in our lives. That is why most investors like a financial plan that lays out the next 20 or 30 or 40 years of our financial lives. There in black and white, or more probably in a rainbow of colors, is the map of our financial future. It…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…