REALLY.....now is the time to buy stocks? Great call. For anyone that missed at least 40-50% gain on their money over the past couple of years. There is only one way to invest in my view........fully invested all the time for the long term. of course this assumes that you are not investing short term money and are not a trader, market timer, or speculator. It also assumes that you are rational and realistic about the markets and your own risk tolerance. U.S. Inflation Slows: Why Now Is the Time to Buy Stocks Lower inflation is becoming a positive impetus for markets once again https://investorplace.com/hypergrow...tion-slows-why-now-is-the-time-to-buy-stocks/
It might help us a little bit if our government did not totally and constantly shoot our businesses in the foot.....and....the arm, the chest, the head, the leg, etc, etc. Not to mention that.....lower corporate and capital gains taxes would UNLEASH massive government tax revenue.....as usual when taxes are cut. The U.S. Economy Would Profit From a Competitive Corporate Tax Rate https://www.realclearmarkets.com/ar...a_competitive_corporate_tax_rate_1085249.html "...the U.S. corporate tax rate is now higher than corporate tax rates in a large majority of the countries in the world. According to this study, 68% of the countries in the world now have a lower corporate tax rate than the United States." ........ "The average corporate tax rates in Asia (19.7%) and Europe (20.18%) are nearly one third lower than the U.S. rate. The average OECD rate is 10% lower at 23.85%. Even the four Scandinavian countries now have a lower average corporate tax rate (21.15%) than the U.S." ....... "The U.S. rate is also significantly higher than the 15% rate China applies to industries encouraged by the Chinese government, including high-tech and software, and business sectors critical to their global supply chain."
Over the past 15-20 years I have trouble identifying a single company that has had as many criminal and civil problems that impacted and screwed their customers. Yes....it appears from this....."ALLEGATION"...that they are still at it. Wells Fargo, Merrill Cash-Sweep Accounts Shortchanged Clients, SEC Alleges https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wells-fargo-merrill-cash-sweep-145103904.html LOL...of course Wells Fargo has been my bank for over 20 years now. Back in one of their earlier "ISSUES" we did have a teller open an account in our name that we did not request or know about. I dont use them for anything other than a single checking account.....no credit cards or other products.
It gets so old seeing the financial media and rumor mongers jerk the markets around day to day. BUT....I will take the gains today. Dow, S&P, Nasdaq climb as techs and rate-cut hopes revive https://finance.yahoo.com/news/live...echs-and-rate-cut-hopes-revive-143105357.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "US stocks jumped on Friday amid a tech stock revival, as investors assessed a week of key data and earnings reports and eyed likely policy shifts under a Trump administration. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) gained 0.7% while the S&P 500 (^GSPC) rose 1%, coming off a losing day for the major gauges. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) put on over 1.6% as Nvidia (NVDA) and Tesla (TSLA) shares nudged back into the green. Markets have turned upbeat as investors take stock of recent days' big bank earnings and inflation readings, which have resuscitated bets on interest-rate cuts. Stocks are on track for big weekly wins after a major rally on Wednesday, while the 10-year Treasury yield (^TNX) pulled back to trade around 4.6% on Friday. Housing starts climbed faster than forecast in December, and US industrial production outstripped estimates. The data out Friday added to a picture of strength in the US economy, buoying rate optimism. Meanwhile, techs were staging a comeback, with Apple (AAPL) stock up slightly in morning trading after booking its worst loss since August. Chipmakers such as Micron (MU) joined Nvidia in making gains, while Coinbase (COIN) was among crypto-linked names getting a boost as bitcoin (BTC-USD) continued its advance above $100,000. Minds are also on potential policy upheaval on the last day of trading before Donald Trump begins his second term as president. Fears are that his plans for tariffs, taxes, and debt — as aired by Treasury pick Scott Bessent on Thursday — could inflame inflation. Inauguration day is Monday, when markets will be closed to mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. China's economy, an adversary for Trump, grew more than expected last year, topping Beijing's 5% target after a stimulus blitz. But Asia stocks lost ground on Friday as investors weigh the potential hit from promised hefty tariffs." MY COMMENT I am not sure I buy any of the reason above....but....who cares. I will take whatever money I can get today by the close.....if we can avoid the...... late day, Friday, into the three day weekend.....FADE.
YES....another day when in reality NOTHING new is going on. So I will as usual do....NOTHING. NOTHING is the theme of the day......along with ENDURE. We will have another short market week next week with the markets closed for MLK day on Monday. It seems like we have not had a full five day week all year....so far. These short weeks disrupt the normal market...."flow" and "feel". They impact traders timing......and....traders that dont want to hold positions for a three day weekend. They disrupt the normal flow of order execution with orders piling up over the OFF days. They also cause the Wall Street professionals to take time off from the markets for extra little vacations. That is my view......not that I would want the markets to stay open over holidays or take away holidays.
Of course I am referring to Dale Robertson who played "Jim Hardie" on the old western.... "The Tales of Wells Fargo." A roving agent for the company who protected the companies cargo from bandits. Every time I see Wells Fargo....I think of that show.
Talk about a (STEALTH?) rally. PLTR is now up by +11% over the past five days.....although still down by nearly 5% over the past month.
Of course that was a classic old TV show....but now.....the question is who are the real BANDITS? Probably at least 50-80% of readers of this thread have never heard of that show. You are.....REALLY OLD.....Smokie.
Probably not true......but I can still dream that the BIG RALLY today is a reflection of the coming.......new government.....which will be tax friendly for all the little people and small and big business....along with being business friendly by trying to cut regulation and bureaucracy. This has NOTHING.....(theme word of the day)....to do with politics or party....I would say the same thing if the other party was coming into power with the same potential policy positions. Being a former busines owner and a life long investor....I view just about all politics and politicians through a lens of.....BUSINESS and TAXES. Not the other way around. I dont think many voters or people think this way.....probably way more oriented toward social, and other issues. In an ideal world I would definately be a.....LIBERTARIAN.
As to the markets, I have been hanging on to the green side so far this year. There has been a ton of noise out there. As usual, most of it is literally about nothing. Thinking back over the past couple of years, we made it through much, much more than expected. The market just flipped the bird to all of it and did it's own thing. Think about all of what investors endured during that span of time. Then think about how it turned out. I agree with what was stated way upthread about all of the attention the markets do get now. Many times it just seems to be too much information. However, I believe the market over time sorts through all of this nonsense. I believe it will in the future as well. Sometimes it takes longer than we may want and it frustrates us, but it still gives us our best chance at financial freedom and independence in the long run. Yes, there are corrections, crashes, unseen events, geo political events, and a whole list of over things. A lot of it is normal and occasionally we get slapped with something unexpected. Time moves on one way or another. Investors contribute more to their own angst about any of these things. Often even worse than the actual event.
I was lazy about looking at my account today....but I just did. I have eight of nine stocks up. The lager today is CMG. I have a nice BIG gain going with about 3.4 hours to go in the day and the week. Yesterday I was just below a half percent loss for YTD in my entire account. if the gains can hold today I will be back to a good gain for 2025 YTD. We need to string together some good days so I can build a bit of a cushion for the year gain and avoid some of this erratic daily..... gain/loss.....YTD figure for my account. BUT......what will be, will be. What it is, it is. It is not like I have any control over anything to do with the markets.
KILLER market today. I closed with eight of nine stocks positive....the only red one was CMG. I also beat the SP500 by 1.22% today. A great way to end the week.
Here is the week that was: DOW year to date +2.58% DOW five days +3.73% SP500 year to date +2.18% SP500 five days +3.71% NASDAQ 100 year to date +2.26% NASDAQ 100 five days +4.12% NASDAQ year to date +1.82% NASDAQ five days +3.85% RUSSELL year to date +2.03% RUSSELL five days +4.61% As for me.......last Friday I was at (-0.50%) year to date for my entire portfolio. Today I am at.....+1.46%....year to date for my entire portfolio. Looks like the DOW.....(GASP)...is in the lead. ONWARD AND UPWARD.
We ventured out to the outlet malls here in Charleston yesterday to do some shopping for our upcoming 2 week vacation. We patronized roughly 15 different stores within the outlet mall all of which were fairly busy for a Friday afternoon. As a recent Nike share holder my intentions were of course to check out the inventory, get a feel for the product and spend a little money. All in all the supply and product looked pretty good and seemed to be staffed reasonably on a weekday. The one thing that caught my eye was that in all of the stores we visited, Nike was the only that had a police officer on duty. Didn't see another officer in any other store nor within the mall grounds. Not sure how to read that..
Nike is a high theft item. The shoes mostly, but any Nike apparel has a bullseye on it for shoplifters.
The BIG KEY to getting inflation out of the economy......oil production and the price of oil. Everyone is impacted by the price of oil and fuel.....every business, everyone that uses the shipping process, every consumer.....everyone. Ramping up and supporting our USA oil companies and production WILL cut into inflation significantly. It will cut across all aspects of the producer and consumer economy. It will also indirectly greatly benefit investors and the markets. Obviously we are going to see a VERY different approach to USA oil production and support over the next four years. Good news for our economy and especially small business and the everyday consumer. Thus....this little article.....not for the political content.....but.....for the OIL content. Trump might get an early economic win with gas prices expected to drop in 2025 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trum...rices-expected-to-drop-in-2025-143007495.html HERE is more on the coming OIL and GAS boom that we will "probably" see in the near future and the resulting drop in cost for the end consumer of gas, diesel, and natural gas. As usual I post this for the investing and economic content and impact.....NOT....anything to do with politics. Trump vowed to declare a national energy emergency as soon as he takes office — here’s how he might do it https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/19/how-trump-could-declare-a-national-energy-emergency-.html My choice as an investor is to benefit from what I think is going to happen with oil production and the impact on consumer and producer prices......in general, and indirectly. I have absolutely ZERO plans to invest in any of the OIL companies.
A GREAT way to secure your future and your retirement. Why passive investing is best for almost everyone saving for retirement Multiple studies find that lower-fee index funds outperform actively managed ones. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-...everyone-saving-for-retirement-140157653.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Investing in market-tracking index mutual funds, known as passive investing, gets brandished as boring. But the truth is in the returns: Index funds routinely clobber funds actively managed by professional stock pickers. Last year was no exception, according to a new BofA Global Research report. Funds run by the pros had a heck of a time beating the returns of passive indexes that track US large-cap equities. Just 36% of actively managed US large-cap mutual funds, for example, delivered bigger gains than their Russell 1000 index benchmarks in 2024. The Russell 1000, an equities index that provides exposure to companies such as Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook parent Meta, had lots of oomph behind it with these hot tech stocks, to be fair. But it’s no fluke. Among over 1,900 US equity mutual funds and ETFs tracked by Morningstar, 19% beat the S&P 500, which had a 25% return, and only 37% beat their category index in 2024. For two decades, S&P Dow Jones Indices has been producing “scorecards” that compare the performance of actively managed equity and fixed-income mutual funds with various indexes over different time spans. In the last three years, for instance, 86% of actively managed funds couldn’t match the S&P 500. Over a 10-year period, 85% of these funds underperformed the S&P 500, according to the data. One superstar admirer of low-fee index funds is Warren Buffett. "In my view, for most people, the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund," Buffett said at a Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting a few years ago. "People will try and sell you other things because there's more money in it for them if they do. And I'm not saying that that's a conscious act on their part. Most good salespeople believe their own baloney...that's why I suggest to people they buy an index fund." Passive is cool I’m a fervent fan of investing my retirement savings in index funds because it’s simple and less expensive than cherry-picking individual stocks and bonds to buy and sell at the perfect time. And you’re likely to ride out the slides in the stock market if you stay the course in diversified baskets of stocks and bonds. Sure, it’s more like taking a gentle tea cup spin at Disney World’s Mad Tea Party than Six Flags' Maxx Force, but for most of us, it’s the ticket to ride. Investors who choose actively managed mutual funds typically pay higher fees than passive investors, which is a headscratcher given the performance imbalance. Calling investing in index funds passive is perfect, too, since the aim of owning them is for you to cool your jets when markets get mucky. Investing in index funds — balanced across stocks, such as the S&P 500 index, and fixed-income bond funds and put on auto-pilot — has been classic advice for many investors, particularly those socking away retirement funds. And if you’re already retired, managing costs helps increase take-home returns. “I anchor clients’ investments in a passive index strategy because history continues to prove itself that passive investments outperform active managers over a long period of time,” Lazetta Rainey Braxton, a financial planner and founder of The Real Wealth Coterie, told Yahoo Finance. “Goals are being met consistently investment-wise without the additional risk of trying to track and follow active managers who can squeak out that extra return after their fees.” While fees have been falling in recent years, in 2023 index equity mutual funds had an asset-weighted average expense ratio of .05%, according to research by the Investment Company Institute (ICI), compared to .42% for actively managed equity mutual funds. A 'steady' climb Index funds are in vogue these days. Some 52.6% of mutual fund and ETF assets were in passive funds as of the end of November, compared to 49.6% in November 2023, according to research and consulting firm Cerulli Associates. One big driver of the move into index funds: an upsurge in target-date fund investing. My guess is many of you are already investing in index funds in your employer-provided retirement plans such as your 401(k). Virtually all 401(k) plan sponsors and the majority of state auto-IRA programs use target-date funds when they automatically enroll workers in a retirement plan. These funds are typically made up of index funds. With a target-date retirement fund, you select the year you’d like to retire and buy a mutual fund with that year in its name (like Target 2044). The fund manager then splits your investment between stocks and bonds, tweaking that to a more conservative mix as the target date nears. At Vanguard, for instance, 83% of 401(k) participants used target-date funds, and 70% of target-date investors had their entire account invested in a single target-date fund. That’s up from 6 in 10 in 2022, and more than double the figure in 2013, according to Vanguard. Simple and cheap I reached out to financial advisers to get their take on the role index funds should play in retiree accounts. Here’s why they love them, too: “The passive approach has been proven to work because of consistency, increasing contributions, time, and compound interest,” Zaneilia Harris, a financial planner and president of Harris & Harris Wealth Management Group, told Yahoo Finance. “John Bogle, the grandfather of passive investing, promoted keeping it simple, easy, and cost-efficient,” she said. But she also advises her clients to add some juice. “Some investors may take a more strategic approach to growing their retirement savings, like adding a handful of individual stocks,” Harris said. For Leo Chubinishvili, a financial planner at Access Wealth, it’s all about those nitty-gritty underlying fees. “Cost efficiency — passive funds, such as index funds, have lower expense ratios compared to actively managed funds,” he told Yahoo Finance. “Cost saving compounds over time, benefiting retirement savers. And passive investments might minimize the temptation to make frequent adjustments based on market volatility.” The case for retirees For current retirees, index funds make a world of sense for a few key reasons, Christine Benz, Morningstar’s director of personal finance, told Yahoo Finance “Running a streamlined investment portfolio is important at any age, but it's particularly beneficial as we age. Index funds provide you with broad market exposure in a simple package. You won't have to worry about management changes or portfolio changes with broad-market index funds, and it's also a cinch to see whether rebalancing is in order and where to do it.” She added, “reducing the moving parts in your portfolio makes life simpler for your loved ones if they need to manage your finances at any point in time.” The tax benefits are another big reason these have appeal for retirees. Index-fund portfolios (especially ETF portfolios) tend to have low tax costs, especially on the stock side, Benz said. “Given that many investors' portfolios are at their high-water mark at retirement, and include a significant share of taxable, non-retirement assets, reducing the drag of taxes is another way to increase take-home returns,” she said. One caveat: “Passive is cheaper than active management and it does very well in a bull market,” said Cary Carbonaro, managing adviser at Ashton Thomas. “It is in a bear market where it might not do as well.”" MY COMMENT The content above mentions the "SPINNING TEA CUP" ride at Disneyland....as "gentle". BALONEY. When my kids were small we were forced to ride those tea cups many times. I would choose any roller coaster.....any time......over those cups. They were BRUTAL. If anything at Disneyland is going to make you sick it is those cups. I am surprized that NASA does not use that ride to train and test astronauts. NOW....as to the real content above.....I am a total fan of passive Index investing....especially in the SP500. A great life long vehicle for any investor. AND....I own a SP500 Index in ALL the accounts that I manage as a balance to the individual stocks. If you are starting new.....I always recommend a SP500 ETF over a SP500 Mutual Fund. The ETF will produce less income tax since ETF's are more tax efficient than Mutual Funds. For many decades over my investing life I have used the SP500 as my target and as a guideline to how my individual investing is doing. It is a perfect measure of personal investing ability. Of course we know....that the vast majority of professionals can NOT beat the SP500. AND.....I suspect that the vast majority of individual retail investors can not beat the SP500 either.
