The Long Term Investor

I am having a good day today...so far. More stocks up than down. NVDA +2.43% and CMG +2.80% doing very well for me.

I am very happy with my CMG so far and am looking forward to that big 50 for 1 stock split in a few weeks. I am hopeful that CMG will be a long term holding for me.

it is nice when you have a stock that is taking off....but in the end....it is all about portfolio performance....AS A WHOLE.

 

Schwab has been having account issues all day. there is a message when you open the page that account values may not be accurate. I guess so.....when I went into my page it showed a gain for the day of nearly $400,000.

SORRY....for me.....not accurate.

i do have a net gain so far today with only three stocks in the GREEN......yes....I double checked them outside of Schwab.those stocks are CMG, HVDA, and HD.

We are seeing some lunch time weakness in the markets. the NASDAQ is FLAT at "0%"......the SP500 and the DOW are in the red.

BUT....I still have hope for the markets to turn green before the close today. Not that....."hope"....is an investment strategy.

 

I did have a really good day today.....a nice big gain. It was driven by CMG and NVDA plus others. To show how good it was today....I also beat the SP500 by 1.30%.

BUT BUMMER.......Schwab is showing a gain of over $300,000 today in just two accounts.....too bad that is INCORRECT DATA.

 

So far I am weathering FED week very nicely. If this can keep up tomorrow....I should end the week with a really good gain. I continue to hit ALL TIME HIGHS nearly every day.

 

I consider this good news for ELON and for TSLA shareholders.

Elon Musk wins Tesla shareholder battle to keep his record-breaking pay

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon...o-keep-his-record-breaking-pay-211135704.html

 

YES WE ALL DO.

 

I NEVER let economics or the economy interfere with what I buy as a "business" investment.....or my investing. The stock markets are NOT the economy.

Quit Playing the Fed’s Dull Waiting Game
Monetary policy is still unpredictable.

https://www.fisherinvestments.com/e...ntary/quit-playing-the-feds-dull-waiting-game

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"Consumer prices didn’t change Wednesday, and neither did Fed rates. Yes, hours after May’s US Consumer Price Index (CPI) report showed prices were unchanged from April (and slowed to 3.3% y/y from 3.4%), the Fed kept the fed-funds target range at 5.25% - 5.5%. Yet expectations took a ride: After the CPI report raised rate cut hopes, the Fed’s infamous forecast “dot plot” projected just one rate cut by yearend. Cue the renewed speculation and high-rate handwringing, which we think investors should tune out. Monetary policy still isn’t predictable or make-or-break for stocks.

The Fed’s own dot plots prove the point. December’s dot plot projected three rate cuts this year, four next year and three in 2026. March’s kept 2024’s three, but trimmed future expectations to three each in 2025 and 2026. Now? Fed people backed up projections of a rate cut flurry. They collectively project just one cut this year (eek!), with four each in 2025 and 2026.

All these shifts followed changes in the inflation rate, which reaccelerated earlier this year. Fed moves are data-dependent. So if the Fed got caught out by unanticipated inflation wiggles and changed its forecasts, then why would its forecasts—or forecasting—suddenly be so prescient now?

In our view, the Fed will handle this as it always does: Policymakers will vote for whatever they judge best at the time, based on the available data and their interpretations of it. Those interpretations will reflect each of their biases and opinions. With 12 people voting on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), this is a hodge podge of subjectivity and opacity.

The Fed’s squishy inflation targeting doesn’t help. As every FOMC statement notes, “The Committee seeks to achieve maximum employment and inflation at the rate of 2 percent over the longer run.” Maximum employment has no numerical definition, and the Fed weighs a range of metrics beyond the headline unemployment rate.

The inflation target pretends to be clearer, as we all should know the Fed uses the headline Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) price index. That has run below the CPI throughout this inflationary episode, due largely to shelter’s lower weighting in PCE (more on this in a sec). It currently sits at 2.70% as of April.[ii] But what does “longer run” mean? Is it three years? Five? The three-year moving average is 4.8%, way off target.[iii] The five-year average is 3.5%.[iv] But if we arbitrarily select 15 years and 6 months as long-term, PCE inflation is bang-on the target. Sooooo, is this mission accomplished? Time to cut?

The Fed, of course, thinks not. Today’s policy statement notes the Fed needs “greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably toward 2 percent” before it cuts. We won’t know for sure for another five years, when the transcripts come out, but it seems fair to say the FOMC discussed May’s CPI report when weighing what to do. Yes, they target PCE, but CPI is timelier, and the same trends tend to influence both.

Therefore, we wonder, what do they remain unsure about? Goods prices, excluding food and energy, are in deflation at -1.7% y/y.[v] Services prices are running hotter, at 5.3% y/y excluding energy services, but a lot of that comes from shelter, car repair and auto insurance.[vi] Shelter is primarily this weird thing called owner’s equivalent rent (OER), which is the Labor Department’s attempt to factor in home ownership as a living cost instead of an investment.

Philosophically, we get it—we think it is better to view the home you own as a roof over your head rather than an appreciating investment, too! But OER is the hypothetical amount a homeowner would pay to rent their own house, and it is based on surveys and stale market data. It is also a cost no one pays. In our view, it is therefore a little weird that OER comprises over one-fourth of CPI.

As for the other outlying components, we daresay the amount of auto mechanics and technicians available to fix cars isn’t something the Fed can fine tune with interest rates. Nor is the availability and price of parts, many of which are imported. And nor are spiraling auto insurance costs, which derive from those high repair costs and the fact that, with all the bells and whistles that live in car bumpers, even a minor fender bender can do thousands of dollars’ worth of damage.

Excluding shelter, CPI is down to 2.1% y/y.[vii] Excluding food, energy and shelter, it is at 1.9% y/y.[viii] The averages are elevated, but that is backward-looking. Money supply growth is forward-looking, and it is crawling at a snail’s pace.

But clearly the Fed needs to see more, and it isn’t clear more of what. Hence, it is 100% impossible to predict when they will cut. Or how often they will cut after they break the ice. Again, if even the Fed doesn’t know what it will do, how can mere non-Fed mortals have the faintest clue?

Not that anyone needs to know. Monetary policy doesn’t have a preset impact. Rate cuts aren’t automatically good (or bad), and hikes aren’t automatically bad (or good). This bull market was born in rate hikes and grew on high rates. Stocks have risen through shifting interest rate expectations. Markets look about 3 – 30 months out, and they are smart enough to see that a rate cut or three likely doesn’t much impact corporate earnings over this stretch.

So give yourself a break. Markets aren’t hyper focused on interest rates, so you don’t need to be either. Which is good, because the Fed is boring! There, we said it. We are sure, or at least we presume, they are nice people. But the documentation, the press releases, the speeches … they are all verbose and boring. Spend your time on more fun things."

MY COMMENT

I would NEVER allow the FED BS to impact my investing. This sort of economic data, drama, and speculation is worthless to me as an investor. Anyone that gets all caught up in this "stuff" is simply asking for trouble.

Investing is all about the specific businesses that you happen to own in the form of stocks. it is all about business analysis, marketing, management and fundamentals. It is NOT about the FED or economic fantasy.

 

Making money so far today. What pause? I am tied up all day with my kids new house closing and moving in.

Not that it matters…….my portfolio does just fine without me.

I like the dip in consumer sentiment today. A positive indicator and contrary indicator for the bull market. And probably good for the FED.

With about 1.5 hours left in the market day I am confident about racking up another all time high.

 

A really good gain for me today. AND....another all time high. I am getting spoiled. I also beat the SP500 by 0.96% today.

My GREEN stocks today were....NVDA, PLTR, COST, GOOGL, MSFT, and CMG.

 

The week that was.

DOW year to date +2.32%
DOW five days (-0.50%)

SP500 year to date +14.52%
SP500 five days +1.69%

NASDAQ100 year to date +18.83%
NASDAQ100 five days +3.77%

NASDAQ year to date +19.80%
NASDAQ five days +3.54%

RUSSELL year to date (-0.33%)
RUSSELL five days (-0.30%)

For me a KILLER WEEK. I ended the week with my entire portfolio at a year to date of....+46.75%. Last week my year to date for the entire portfolio was +39.48%. I kicked ass on the SP500 this week. LETS KEEP ROLLING NEXT WEEK.

 

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND EVERYONE.

 

well....got my kids new house closed today and they got the keys. They have the kitchen all moved in already and will make many trips to the new house over the weekend with small and delicate items. The movers come for the furniture and big items on Sunday. That is what I did today.

As to one of my few posts earlier today......here is what I was talking about.

Consumer sentiment hits lowest level in 7 months

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/consumer-sentiment-hits-lowest-level-in-7-months-152049172.html

 

No argument here.

We used to not have $3T companies

https://sherwood.news/markets/trillion-dollar-valuation-microsoft-nvidia-apple/

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

"Forget the Magnificent Seven. Let’s talk about the Big Three.

In reading this nice piece my Sherwood colleagues did spotlighting the lopsided contributions of mega-tech companies to this year’s market rally, it struck me that we’ve never had three, separate three-trillion-dollar companies before.

In fact, until 2018, there were precisely zero companies with valuations that large.

It’s hard to get one’s mind around the what it even means to have a trillion-dollar capitalization, much less a three-trillion dollar market price tag. At some point the numbers become a kind of abstraction.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing, or one of the most remarkable things about Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia, is that there’s very little indication they’re egregiously overvalued.

Forward price-to-earnings multiples of 30 (Apple), 33 (Microsoft) and 43 (Nvidia) don’t seem particularly unreasonable in light of the apparently impregnable (and in some cases quasi monopolistic) positions they occupy in the American economy and the insane profits these companies produce. Apple and Microsoft both made more than $20 billion in Q1 alone. Nvidia made $13 billion. Sheesh"

MY COMMENT

Three of my nine stocks here. I am very happy with them. BUT....I am even more happy with my portfolio as a whole. I have no plans to make any changes as it is performing brilliantly.

 

I have not done research on them lately....but they are right at a 52 week high.

I like WMT. In fact they are probably my number one stock to look at.....as a non-tech company....if I had any money to add a company to my portfolio.....which I dont. Their stock has done very nicely over the past month to five years.

They seem to have pretty good management. I also like the fact that they basically have NO COMPETITION. They are the only big box discount retail store left standing. I consider them and COSTCO as different business niches. In many areas they are the primary lower cost grocery store in addition to all their other products. I also think they do very well in their seasonal stuff for Christmas, Easter, back to school, etc, etc. They have also been able to develop a pretty good online selling base.

We shop there at least once or twice a month. I have noticed that the "style" of their men's and women's clothing seems to not be as good as in the recent past. From what I see at our local store, this started about 2 years ago. Although this perception on my part may be because they are targeting a different customer than in the past with their clothing.

YTD they are up by +26%.....I consider that very good for their type of business. Over one year they are +27.46%.

They certainly had a good earnings BEAT last time around.

Walmart surges to all-time high as earnings beat on high-income shopper, e-commerce gains

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/16/walmart-wmt-q1-2025-earnings-.html

 

The current BIG RALLY and BULL MARKET often operates in stealth mode and is often unloved.....fine with me.

The unloved stock market rally: Why so many investors find it hard to embrace this run to records

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/15/the...d-it-hard-to-embrace-this-run-to-records.html

(BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content)

What to make of a record-setting market rally that elicits more mistrust than fear of missing out?

The S&P 500 has made an all-time high on nearly thirty days this year, four of them this past week. U.S equity wealth has never been greater, and the index path has even been pretty smooth: In eight of the last ten trading days, the S&P 500 has moved less than 0.3%.

Yet the all-consuming conversation among investors is about how the advance is untrustworthy, lacking in broad participation and unreflective of an idealized soft-landing economic scenario.

To note that everyone is decrying the rally’s lack of breadth is not to deny or dismiss the point. The yawning divergence in performance between a tight cluster of enormous tech companies anointed as artificial intelligence flagships and the few-thousand other stocks left behind is inescapable. And it is, in fact, the source of those tiny daily moves — violently offsetting currents suppressing index movement.

The S&P 500, with 20% of its market value contained in three stocks (Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia), is up nearly 14% this year and essentially at a record, with the index’s equal-weighted version up just 3.4% and sitting 4% under its late-March peak. The main S&P is up more than 3% in the second quarter while its median stock is off 5% quarter to date. The broader Russell 1000, the entire large-cap cohort, is essentially flat year to date on an equal-weighted basis.

The S&P 500 has added $5.5 trillion in market capitalization in 2024, with roughly half kicked in by the Big Three.

This combination of persistent gains in the headline S&P 500 and more churn underneath has created an odd combination of an overbought benchmark with most member stocks stalled or correcting. The index appears a bit stretched to the upside based on how far it is above its 50-day moving average and other measures. Meanwhile, fewer than half its components are even above their individual 50-day averages.





CNBC

Summing up the lopsided action late Friday, Bespoke Investment Group suggested: “The action this week felt like a blowoff move, with investors throwing in the towel and finally giving up on any hope for appreciation in smaller-caps and begrudgingly buying the mega-caps that have already seen ridiculously large moves higher.”

It’s a plausible take, but impossible to endorse or refute with confidence. There is no single correct way for a market to behave. Sometimes, weak breadth reverses to close the gap with the heavyweights, other times it foretells an index pullback. Always, it frustrates stock pickers who seek to outperform a rampaging benchmark, while sapping conviction from most investors.

Familiar market conditions?

None of this is new. Over the past decade, we’ve been through “FANG” dominance, then “FAANMG,” the “Magnificent Seven” and now the “AI elite.” Periodically along the way, as the macro landscape brightened or the policy outlook eased, an all-in rally would burst into view, as in 2017, 2020 and late 2023, to build up a breadth cushion for months to come.

This is currently a market beset by a scarcity of fundamental conviction, one in which the largest companies are also those with the best secular-growth prospects, healthiest forward-earnings trends and strongest balance sheets.

All the multiyear thematic extremes being cited by skeptics — large over small stocks, growth over value, high- over low-quality — are essentially measuring this same preference. Market concentration is exacerbated when the “best” are also the biggest.

So then, these are familiar atmospheric conditions. Yet, the particular macro-market weather patterns this month have shifted in a noteworthy way. Treasury yields have retreated dramatically, the 10-year falling from above 4.6% on May 29 to 4.22%, alongside a series of cooler inflation readings and somewhat softer economic numbers.

In recent times, yields down has meant stronger breadth, with financial, cyclical and small-cap stocks getting some relief. That’s not the case thus far in June, as the market implicitly exhibits greater sensitivity to hints of an economy decelerating more than desired by the Federal Reserve or investors.

The Citi U.S. Economic Surprise Index illustrates the waning momentum of domestic macro inputs relative to forecasts. Hardly an alarming descent, but one that has investors’ attention.




CNBC

It’s not fully clear that the Fed’s new collective rate outlook or Chair Jerome Powell’s comments after last week’s policy meeting caused a radical rethink of the policy posture, but neither was the result particularly clarifying.

Going into the Fed meeting, the market was implicitly pricing in between one and two quarter-point rate cuts by year’s end. In the “dot plot” of committee projections, 15 of 19 members penciled in either one or two cuts. On and after the decision day, CPI and PPI inflation readings came in encouragingly light.

The Fed has kept the overnight rate steady at the cycle high of 5.25-5.5% for 11 months, an unusually long pause. The economy has performed better than expected over that time, and inflation has slid to within sight of the Fed’s target zone.

As such, the Fed is betting the cost of waiting remains low, but the market is starting to grow antsy — though not panicky — at the thought that the Fed’s patience might outlast the economy’s resilience. The ideal but far-from-guaranteed scenario is for the Fed to find a window to begin “optional” easing moves at a measured pace, rather than emergency rate cuts in haste.

This all helps explain a somewhat indecisive market with weak investor sponsorship of economically sensitive groups. Yet if the market was sending up urgent flares of imminent economic danger, purely defensive sectors such as consumer staples and pharmaceuticals wouldn’t look so unwell. And, as Strategas Research technical strategist Chris Verrone notes, corporate-credit indicators remain healthy, even if spreads have widened a smidge in recent weeks.

Helpfully, the widespread consternation over the poor market breadth has drained enthusiasm from the crowd, the unease over the uneven rhythms of the tape preserving a helpful wall of worry.

Wall Street strategists as a group project no upside for the S&P 500 in the second half, their average and median targets both below Friday’s closing level. The weekly American Association of Individual Investors survey shows the spread between bulls and bears narrowing lately even with the S&P grinding higher.




AAII

Not to suggest “everyone is bearish” in a way that makes a contrarian upside play obvious, or that the undertone of caution inoculates the market from difficulty as summer progresses. The second half of June has been among the tougher stretches of the calendar in recent years.

The upside-leading semiconductor stocks are stupendously overbought and flows into the sector ETFs look overheated. The manic, frothy action around the AI and stock-split names has been localized but considerable.

As I’ve suggested here before, the 5-6% April pullback in the S&P 500 seemed necessary but perhaps stopped short of a cleansing flush that would’ve perhaps generated a more energetic and inclusive new up leg. The messy churn below the surface of the index since then could just be the market’s way of refreshing itself over time.

Still, with second-quarter S&P 500 earnings growth now projected at a 9% annual rate; with the majority of stocks still holding in a longer-term uptrend; with Treasury yields back in the comfort zone; and with the average stock and investor attitudes well off the boil, it’s tough to shift the benefit of the doubt over to the bears just yet."

MY COMMENT

DUH.....yes the greatest and largest companies in the world are going to usually be market leaders and winners.

In addition way too many people and investors are caught up in the economic BS...the FED....all the media story lines....etc, etc, etc. They can not see the reality of the current market....even though it is right in their face. They are caught up in superstition, data, statistics, formulas, investing platitudes, and complex investing plans and schemes. They are caught up in the foolish media talk and economics.

Stealth rallies and un-loved bull markets are often the norm. People just always doubt what is clearly happening. Human nature at work and the reason that most people that are active investors under-perform.

You have to see the wave to ride the wave.