The Long Term Investor

Anyone interested in tariffs might want to look at why TSLA does not sell in the third largest consumer market in the world for cars....India. A much better market than China and a higher population. Of course the cost of getting a car into the country is 100%......70% duty and 30% luxury tax.

BUT anyway....yes it was a good market today as expected last night. I had only a single stock in the red.....COST. AND....got a good beat on the SP500 by 1.15% today.

TOMORROW.....GOOGL earnings after the bell and the BIG event of the day.....the NFL DRAFT. No I am not that much of a pro football fan........I prefer college.

 

Investors need to just grow up and quit the whining, cry-baby, "stuff".

Everyone claims to be a long term investor........to an extent more than I have ever seen in my life....yet....all we hear them whining about is short term NOISE. Yes markets go down, corrections happen, "sh*t happens.....but for the most part....it is all short term. Get over it. "YOU" picked your investments....just shut up and live with them....or sell them....or get out of the markets.....I dont care. It is your money do what you want.

Just IGNORE it all. Especially the daily flood of DIRE predictions and content.

 

To continue the above:

Comparisons Get Carried Away
Some perspective on common headlines comparing April’s slide through Monday to 1932.

https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/insights/market-commentary/comparisons-get-carried-away

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

"As ever when markets fall fast, Great Depression comparisons are starting to roll in. Tuesday morning, headlines and tweets far and wide cast this April’s decline to date in historical terms—painting the Dow’s drop this month through Monday’s close as “the worst April since 1932.” Such comparisons can easily rattle nerves. But this comparison is flawed—and amounts to mere trivia anyway. Getting caught up in it can be hazardous to your future financial health, in our view.

First, ignore the Dow. We mean literally. Always. It is a broken, narrow index of 30 companies. Broken how, you ask? Simple. It is price-weighted, meaning the stock with the highest share price moves the gauge the most. Not the biggest company. Just the one that happens to sport the highest share price. Goldman Sachs has the highest share price in the Dow today.

The Dow is the oldest index, but oldest doesn’t mean best. Later creations, like the S&P 500 and MSCI World, are market-cap weighted. This takes the number of shares of each stock available for purchase and multiplies them by the price. Hence, each stock’s footprint in the market is proportional to its actual total value. Bigger firms matter more to movement; smaller firms less so. Today, Apple has the biggest market cap, some 20 times Goldman Sachs’s.[ii] It means more to these indexes’ moves. That is sensible. Highest share price, an arbitrary feature, isn’t.

So ditch the Dow. Is this the S&P 500’s worst April since 1932? Answer: No. It is the worst since … April 2022’s -8.72%.[iii] On a total return basis, the S&P 500 is down -8.02% this month to date through April 21’s close—history’s fifth-worst April.[iv] And a far cry from April 1932’s -19.75%.

But then, why stop at Aprils?

Through Monday, this month’s decline would rank as the 54th-worst month since good data start in January 1926. There are no doubt some historically bad periods among those 54. But there are also some mere corrections (short, sharp, sentiment-driven moves of -10% to -20%). Stocks fell -14.46% in August 1998.[v] Corrections in 1933 (after the Great Depression’s June 1932 low) make the list twice.[vi] There is December 2018.[vii] And while the Crash of 1987 makes the list twice (October and November), so does the non-crash of September 1986.[viii]

Our point here isn’t that April hasn’t been rough. It has. Or that it couldn’t get worse—it could. It isn’t even anything about the minutiae of historical month rankings.

It is this: These types of Depression comparisons, based on varying inputs, are common deep in corrections or bear markets. Often, comparisons to the 1970s or Japan’s “Lost Decades” follow. But comparisons like this are counterproductive, achieving little more than instilling fear. They tell you exactly nothing about what lies ahead, which is what really matters. Not where this current decline would rank on a historical list of entries. That is trivial. Your financial goals aren’t. Don’t let fearful, backward-looking chatter lead you astray."

MY COMMENT

AMEN.

I apply the same reasoning as the above article to the constant, every day, articles we see now quoting some MORON regarding the.......GASP....coming RECESSION. What a load of baloney. There is ZERO indication that we are in or facing a recession.

 

And to continue.

As to POLITICS......"I" will not get into it on this board. BUT.....I am not a moderator or dictator of this thread. Others are free to talk about whatever they wish on here....politics or anything else.

SO....if I dont respond or comment on politics on here DO NOT assume that I agree or disagree. I simply do not care as an investor. it is a waste of time.

I have been on many money boards in the past. Most of them were killed off by rampant political posting and bickering. After a while people get tired of it and leave. SO......count me out. I get enough politics in my day to day life without having to deal with it here.

BUT....as I said if that is your interest and you want to carry it onto this board....have at it.....this is a FREE SPEECH ZONE......although I am NOT a moderator so I really have no say one way or another.

 

NOW....on to what counts. LONG TERM INVESTING.

The Things That Make You Money

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/04/the-things-that-make-you-money/

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

"Buying stocks is easy.

You might purchase a stock because it’s going down and feel like it represents a wonderful buying opportunity. Or maybe you buy a stock that’s already going up in the hopes that it will continue to go up even more.

There is always a good reason to buy.

Selling is a little trickier.

Sometimes you sell when stocks are up because you think they cannot possibly go up any further. No one ever went broke taking a profit, right? You don’t want to kick yourself for getting too greedy. Or sometimes you sell when stocks start going down because you’re worried they could fall even further.

Selling can lead to some regret if you get out of a position too early or don’t sell before a crash but you can always justify your sell discipline.

Holding is the hardest part because it combines all the feelings and potential regrets that can arise from both buying and selling. Howard Marks once wrote, “It’s not the things you buy and sell that make you money; it’s the things you hold.”

Buying is the easy part of buy-and-hold. Anyone can buy-and-hope. It’s the hold part that’s hard.

It was easy to hold onto stocks in 2023 and 2024, as the U.S. equity markets rose 26% and 24% in back-to-back years.

This year is much harder. Volatility is up. Uncertainty rises by the day. Confidence is shaken.

Legendary golfer Ben Hogan once said, “A good round of golf is when you can hit three shots that turn out exactly like you envision them before you swing the club.”

That’s generally the case with investing too. Things never work out exactly like you envision.

No one envisioned 2025 to look like this coming into the year. Investors didn’t sign up for a world trade war but you play the ball where it lies.

This is the time when holding on becomes unbearable for certain investors. The noise is cranked up. People are worried. A little bit of panic is setting in. These are the types of market environments where you question your strongly held investment beliefs.

I don’t know what’s going to happen but I do know that abandoning your investment philosophy is not going to help matters.

The investment strategy you choose to implement has much less bearing on your performance than actually sticking to a long-term plan no matter what happens in the market.

When all else fails, I like to abide by Warren Buffett’s Fourth Law of Motion:

Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.” If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.

I am always a proponent of the idea that less is more, but even more so during turbulent markets. The best risk control you have right now is knowing what you own and why you own it.

It’s much more difficult to stick with a complex strategy because it’s harder to understand. You can more easily lean into the pain when you know what you’re buying, holding and why.

Here’s what we know when it comes to investing in stocks:

• We know that stocks are the best asset class for generating long-term returns that exceed inflation.
• We know that stocks occasionally exhibit bone-crushing volatility.
• We know that, on average, stocks fall by 5% roughly two to three times per year.
• We know that, on average, stocks fall by 10% roughly once every year or two.
• We know that, on average, stocks fall by 20% or more roughly once every 4 to 5 years.

None of that has changed.

The average intra-year drawdown for the S&P 500 going back to 1928 is -16.3%:


This year (so far), we’ve seen a decrease of -19%. That’s not fun but it’s also not out of the realm of what you should expect to see on occasion.

Risk in the markets is ever-present. The only thing that changes is your perception of risk.

That perception is what makes it hard to hold during periods of uncertainty like this.

You don’t get the reward without taking the risk."

MY COMMENT

In reality........"you"....are the greatest risk to your own portfolio. Your over-thinking, your over-analysis, your fear and panic, your emotion driven behavior......"you" being human.

The key is the ability to recognize emotional investing behavior and overcome it. As has been said many time it is all a function of RISK TOLERANCE.....and a portfolio that matches your ACTUAL risk tolerance.

 

A little bit of semi-economic news today.

Home sales last month dropped to their slowest March pace since 2009

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/24/march-home-sales-drop.html

"Key Points

• Sales of previously owned homes in March fell 5.9% from February.
• Inventory was up nearly 20% from a year earlier.
• More inventory and slower sales are starting put the chill on prices."

MY COMMENT

Of course ALL real estate is local, local, local. Even in a city or county....there can be extreme variations from location to location. I do find this interesting:

“In a stark contrast to the stock and bond markets, household wealth in residential real estate continues to reach new heights,” Yun said. “With real estate asset valuation at $52 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Flow of Funds, each percentage point gain in home prices adds more than $500 billion to the household balance sheet.”