Well I think we’ll have ALOT more to lose than just our investment moneys if the elections take a turn in November. At least that’s my attitude when it comes to investing. It’s kinda like saying let me rely on our economy and if we get hit with a nuclear bomb later this year I’ll regret investing all this money. No. I likely won’t survive if that happens so money would be the last thing I’d worry about. My 4 tech companies in the “tech account” are: NOW, TWLO, CRM, DOCU I started off with SPLK but changed it overnight because I wasn’t too impressed with some aspects of the company. But I still think it’s a good buy even right now for value and growth. And it’s amazing to me that all those growth tech companies are mostly going upwards. Last year I invested in big companies that were not doing too well. Like Amazon for example had a long period where the stock hit 2000 and went down to 1700... that’s when I got in. All the analysts said that amazon is overvalued and it will never get back to 2000 levels. Ha. Now, it’s kinda like the opposite - buy a company as SOON as they start to explode. weve seen it with tsla, apple, Nvidia, DOCU... once they go up they just continue to shine. Overall I’m more excited about buying new positions than selling them, which I hear is not so good. My wife knows; I’m a big hoarder! I amassed tens of thousands of collectibles mainly comic books. But I only deal with quality. No junk! of course I sell my A$$ off as well, but my attitude is always to sell the hype and keep the blue chip inventory. I’ve made almost 200k in the past 5 years and built a nearly $500k collection with my collectibles. And that’s just a hobby mind you. Now I’m starting to see a pattern with stocks that’s very similar to the collectibles business. At least I think that’s my style of collecting/investing. I’m still very very new to this. So even though we have good income, strong business and large enough savings amounts, I’m not ready yet to invest LARGE amounts on the scale that WXYZ does. Yet But hey we’re in absolutely NOOO rush. And I’m loving the engagement with the stock market and of course MAKING MONEY. So baby steps for me for now Thanks again for all you preach over here. Seriously. That’s an amazing thing you’re doing- inspiring investors to make sound moves with their hard earned capital. NO BS. Simply smart thinking and bold action. I’ve never read or heard of anything similar to your teachings and I’m just glad I’ve discovered it along the ride. Who do I send the check to???
Thanks again Zukodany. Actually if you think about it.........what I do is EXACTLY what.......EVERYONE........does with their 401K money. They put it in, get the match, and hold for the long term in a mutual fund or ETF. Primarily because they are forced to.......I dont think many can trade a 401K in most jobs. They invest that money for the LONG TERM. As to: "I’m not ready yet to invest LARGE amounts on the scale that WXYZ does. Yet" I DID NOT EITHER.......you dont just jump in and start investing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.........who has that kind of money as a new investor. Some might.....but most people do not. It is a SLOW......gradual.....process. If you......jump in big...... you will probably lose a lot of money. I DID NOT start out with lots of money to invest. I started out SMALL like everyone else. What made the difference was when I had the guts to go into business for myself in about 1977. That business generated really good money and I forced myself to save a big chunk every year...........FOR YEARS. Over time we built up more and more and more. The first KEY was to have some understanding of investing at a very young age........compliments of my mom.......at a time when virtually no one invested. The second KEY was to start young and APPRECIATE the power of COMPOUNDING.
I have a question that I’m hoping someone knows the answer too. I hold SPY in my IRA and today it had a return of .96%, which is a beat on the S&P and my 401k fund of SSSYX of .20% for the day. I was under the impression that SPY basically matches the S&P and I’m not sure why there is a difference today. It seems most days to be identical. I’m not complaining because it’s good but I must be missing something. Thanks for all the comments everyone. I don’t always post but I usually read what you guys say.
Jwalker......I have no idea. I dont own or follow SPY. BUT......it is supposed to mimic the SP500. I GUESS that match to the SP500 in not too precise. Today the SP500 was +1.54%............SPY was 1.45%. Once again a pretty large difference. OBVIOUSLY SPY is NOT very precise in tracking the SP500 on some days. Here are some reasons........in general: Why Your Index Fund Has a Different Return Than Its Index https://www.betterment.com/resources/why-your-index-fund-has-a-different-return-than-its-index/
As to today.........YES........again. The markets are getting pretty boring. Green, green, green. At least that is what I got today in my accounts. I DID however........lose out to the SP500 today by .77%. ABOVE......Zukodany said: "I’ve never read or heard of anything similar to your teachings......" I was thinking about this today while driving from San Antonio. You know......how I invest.......that is how nearly EVERYONE......USED.....to invest. Most investors I knew back in the 1970's, 1980's, invested this way. There was no trading like now to speak of. People tended to have a portfolio and be much more long term. Like Warren Buffett.......he is the same way........buy good companies....at a good price......and hold them for the long term. Peter Lynch.....the same. Commissions were too high to trade in and out. Income taxes were insanely high.....up to 60-70%..... so short term gains were not good. Buying and selling in ODD LOTS was discouraged by fees. ROUND LOTS.....100 shares....were the norm. What I have seen is starting with the day trading.....DOT-COM.....era in the 1990's and ESCALATING to today......is all this SHORT TERM.......TRADING......mentality. Brokerages in the old days called it........"INVESTING" and "INVESTORS". NOW they TOTALLY use the term "TRADING" and "TRADERS". They have shifted the mentality of people to basically CHURNING their own accounts. Back than it was a BIG VIOLATION for a broker to trade your account too actively. NOW......people are CHURNING their own accounts and think that is the way to invest. The thinking of the average investor has been turned on its head. SO........what I do is not really my "TEACHINGS". It is how people used to invest and how I have always invested. I am NOT doing anything unique or different or shockingly different. It is just that the STYLE of what and how investors are supposed to do things has changed over the years and..........in my opinion.......NOT for the better. AND......I have been left behind.....as a REMNANT OF THE PAST. Like a lot of things in the MODERN ERA........people have no memory or concept of what used to be the norm, what used to work, and the best way to do something. As has been said many times.........JUST LIKE THE MOVIE IDIOCRACY.
I started tracking the portfolio in a spreadsheet. I use mint and personal capital but it doesn't give me this view. Hope you all like it.
back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the 70's, I was 100 lbs lighter and didn't drink as much. The belief was that the active trading created volatility. If everyone could buy and sell at will, stocks would rise and fall without predictability. they were right. Look at today's market. Anybody can buy and sell at will. Even poor people, who can't afford 100 shares can buy a fractional share. Without a broker to advise or counsel the trades. Anybody can jump in and out, and do whatever they want. As if the stock market was like any other free world marketplace. might as well let me go to the Tokyo fish market auction, and screw them up by bidding up the wrong fish. The hardest part is buying at a good price. I have never had luck with timing the market. Nowadays, I simply buy. I buy what I believe is a good company. Then I don't worry about short term volatility. If the company is okay, I will make money on it 40 years later. Or I die. Then someone else deals with capital gains. I have made bad choices. I should have sold some. Lost money holding GE, Hertz, Ford, Xerox, IBM.....I don't know how to time the market. I already lost that money on paper. I just keep holding on to see what happens next. In the meantime, I keep buying.
yes.......to the quotes above. One thing I.......OBVIOUSLY........do not do is give as much consideration to "Value" as many investors USED TO. I tend to be more of a BIG CAP...........HIGH GROWTH POTENTIAL investor. I am NOT as concerned with share price at the time I purchase as I am with the POTENTIAL for long term GROWTH......going forward. I think even Buffett has evolved toward this approach over the years. That is one reason he could bring himself to eventually purchase APPLE. He realized that "value" when talking about the modern BIG CAP TECH companies is not necessarily A FUNCTION OF buying at a good share price. In those sorts of companies "value" is more often reflected in the LONG TERM GROWTH POTENTIAL. As long as you buy at a price that is reasonable looking at the forward growth PROBABILITY and POTENTIAL........you will be fine. REMEMBER.......the ONLY way to achieve that long term growth potential is to............hold for the long term.
A LITTLE bit of random reading for today: Weekly jobless claims total 881,000, better than expected as labor market continues to heal https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/03/weekly-jobless-claims.html (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "Key Points New filings for jobless claims totaled 881,000 last week, better than the 950,000 Dow Jones estimate. The number reflects an improving labor market as well as a change in the methodology used by the Labor Department. Continuing claims fell to 13.3 million, a drop of more than 1.2 million from the previous week. U.S. weekly jobless claims total 881,000 for week ending Aug. 29 New filings for jobless claims totaled 881,000 last week, better than estimates as the employment market continued its gradual progress during the coronavirus pandemic recovery. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a total of 950,000. The number reflects an improving labor market as well as a change in methodology from the Labor Department to address seasonal factors. Unique circumstances associated with the coronavirus likely caused jobless claims totals to be overstated during the pandemic. While the number represented a drop from previous weeks, those totals were not revised, making comparisons difficult. However, the department did note that claims for the week ended Aug. 29 did represent a decline from the previous week’s 1.011 million. Using the old methodology, the total would have been 1.02 million, according to Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. Continuing claims fell sharply, dropping by 1.24 million to 13.254 million. The insured unemployment rate, a basic calculation of those getting benefits against the total labor force, fell by 0.8 percentage points to 9.1%. The Labor Department changed its methodology from one that used seasonal adjustments to account for normal disruptions in the job market that don’t apply as much under the virus-related conditions. The unadjusted total, which has consistently run below the adjusted numbers during the pandemic, was 833,352 last week, up nearly 8,000 from the previous week. Claims under the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program rose sharply last week to 759,482, an increase of 151,674, according to unadjusted figures. The program has provided benefits during the pandemic to those who normally wouldn’t be eligible for unemployment insurance. “In short, the pace of layoffs still remains very high, and it appears that the proportion of newly laid-off people quickly finding another job is falling,” Shepherdson said. At the state level, Florida saw the biggest decline for the week at 12,312, while California showed the biggest gain, at 39,958. The total for workers receiving benefits, a number that is a week behind the current data, rose to 29.22 million for the week ended Aug. 15, up about 2.2 million from the week before. The claims number comes a day ahead of the government’s closely watched nonfarm payrolls report for August. Economists expect 1.32 million more jobs to have been created and the unemployment rate to fall from 10.2% to 9.8%." MY COMMENT NO........I am not going to pick on the HAPLESS economists.....again. I am starting to feel sorry for them and their INCOMPETENCE. The economy continues to slowly pick up steam. It is .......however......still under the DRAG of the CRAZY states that will not release their people.
HERE is a very relevant article to the discussion above about waiting for a correction to enter the markets versus all in all at once: The Stock Market Is Expensive, But Don’t Wait Until It Gets Cheaper (BOLD is my opinion OR what I consider important content) "The U.S. stock market looks expensive. Don’t wait until it gets cheaper. “We recommend against staying on the sidelines, even when markets are at record highs,” says UBS Global Wealth Management CIO Mark Haefele. “Time in the market is important to achieving financial goals.” Personally, I have been looking at this for months now. I’ve wanted to get into the tech gold rush, even through ETFs. ARK Innovation (ARKK) ARKK -4% was my target. It’s Tesla TSLA -5.6% heavy, so I thought it was just too expensive. I’d be chasing a runaway train and as soon as it stopped I’d be flattened, running face first into the caboose. Had I bought it three months ago, I would have realized a gain of 54.75%, nearly double that of the Nasdaq NDAQ -0.8%. (Face palm.) Tesla-heavy ARK Innovation is beating the Nasdaq. Yahoo! Finance Stocks are being fueled by Fed support. Research shows that entering the market all at once has historically offered the best outcomes—even at record highs — rather than dipping in. Subsequent 12-month returns have averaged 12% since 1960. I’m still going to dip. August was a strong month for stocks. The S&P 500 rose 7%, its best August in 34 years. The Index has been up for at least five straight months, annoying the Wall Street haters who don’t understand how the market can rise even though the economy has been effectively shut down, or partially shut down, over that period due to the pandemic. The 56% rally from its March lows have been driven by a few tech stocks, but that’s not all. Some post-pandemic coronavirus trades are doing well in the last three months. The Cheesecake Factory CAKE +3.4% is up 43%. X-Trackers China CSI-300 (ASHR) ASHR -1% is still up, now at 30% since June as the country comes down from its SARS 2 outbreak. Retail investors may still be worried that the pandemic will come roaring back, the government stimulus checks won’t come, and the presidential election will send markets into a tailspin, messing with market timing for those thinking short-term. “Investors are turning their attention back toward Washington, monitoring closely the prospects of a new round of stimulus that could inject even more cash into the economy,” notes Jason Pride, CIO of private wealth at Glenmede. Given the recent examples of the high opportunity costs of sitting on the sidelines, UBS’ Haefele says that, at the very least, investors can take a defensive approaches to picking stocks. That doesn’t mean investing in utility companies. It means averaging-in risks, buying on the dips, instead of going all in all at once in order to buy at different price points. “Investors looking to protect against the risk of bad timing, an optimal strategy is dollar-cost averaging their planned allocation to riskier assets,” says Haefele. “Establish a set schedule—generally within 12 months or less—to reduce the cost of missing out on gains.” If the market falls 5% or more, buy it. Tesla's multiples are astronomical. Market still buying. Yahoo! Finance China may be at risk in a Trump victory, but is seen gaining even more in a Biden victory as he is expected to end tariffs. Recently, a reform-minded Chinese think tank called on Beijing to counter U.S. decoupling efforts by reforming and opening up its markets. This week, trade ministers from Japan, India and Australia discussed a joint “supply chain resilience initiative” to counter China’s regional dominance, Bloomberg reported. U.S.-China tensions will likely worsen until November, which doesn’t only have implications for the A-shares market — China’s stocks listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen — but for companies that are dependent on China and may face retaliation for policies currently gunning for major tech names like Huawei, Tencent’s WeChat messaging app, and ByteDance’s TikTok. MY COMMENT Kind of a WEIRD article.....but.......I posted it anyway. The author makes the point that he recommends against staying on the sidelines and that the research supports all in all at once. After that he spends the rest of the article talking about how people can do the opposite. I think he knows that MOST people just can NOT bring themselves to BELIEVE the research.....and.......therefore.....it is better to at least DO SOMETHING to start to get back in even if it is not the OPTIMAL STRATEGY supported by the research. It appears that we are on a path for the DOW to join the SP500 and NASDAQ soon with a new ALL TIME HIGH. We are very close right now. Once that happens we will see DOW 30,000 in the near future.......disregarding the risk of the election. We were heading to DOW 30,000 when this pandemic DOOM&GLOOM and FEAR&PANIC took over and the geniuses in the government bureaucracies decided to lock down the entire economy.......for the first time in HUMAN HISTORY. When we hit that ALL TIME HIGH in the DOW the markets will have TOTALLY recovered from the sell off. AND........like THE MAJORITY of recovery's historically..........MOST.......people will have significantly HIGHER portfolio value than they had at the highs before the virus.
Shocking how no one cares to think that way today anymore. Couple everything that you write here with relevant articles and quotations that reflect your thinking and real time diary of your investment practices and you got a WINNING journal for the new or old investor. I used to read other similar journals from other boards and they seriously got me ill. So much negativity and trashing our economy and hypocrisy it was disgusting. I seriously thought that was the norm. So yes. I’m totally glad I found this “little” thread! Well well we’ll... Looks like nasdaq is taking a serious hit today! Is this the result of the above mentioned trading practices of late? Most likely I would think... but hey just like you said... it ain’t fun being green ALL the time. Let’s see how this develops!
Could be trading practices. CERTAINLY people taking some profits. ALSO......a lot of "professionals" do not like to hold positions over a three day weekend. I see it as TOTALLY normal considering how far and fast the markets have run up lately. I think this reflects a BIT of caution in the markets and is a good thing......in general. We need to digest and consolidate the recent gains a little bit. BUT.....we dont need to do it ALL in ONE day. Interesting that APPLE is now $15.31 BELOW where I cashed in my trade last Friday. I am CURIOUS how it will do over the next month or two. Short term performance.........however....... is IRRELEVANT....what really counts is the fact that they are a GREAT COMPANY with a big future.
I know what you mean....Zukodany: "I used to read other similar journals from other boards and they seriously got me ill. So much negativity and trashing our economy and hypocrisy it was disgusting. I seriously thought that was the norm." I have been on many similar boards in the past. BUT.......I have been posting the same stuff for so long.........about 25 years......that I have had all that sort of stuff BEAT OUT OF ME a long time ago. One thing about being a LONG TERM INVESTOR.........there is always a BRIGHT FUTURE ahead.....it is just a matter of how far ahead.
SORRY.....anyone else.....but.....I kind of welcome this little dip. A family member is expecting to have $410,000 wired to their account today or tomorrow...........I hope. I am NOT a market timer........BUT...... this little dip will create a nice buying opportunity for the investment of those funds. I have my plan all worked out to invest this money......all in all at once......among the 12 stocks and 2 mutual funds that make up my Portfolio Model.
WELL.....now it is OBVIOUS why stocks dropped today. It was compliments of the NEW YORK TIMES.......in my opinion. Justice Dept. Plans to File Antitrust Charges Against Google in Coming Weeks https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/politics/google-antitrust-justice-department.html ANYONE that believes that this story......was NOT (allegedly) leaked and known to EVERY Wall Street "professional" since early this morning......well I have a really nice bridge that I will sell you really cheap.(just speculation on my part) So, they all took off like a herd of lemmings and we were off to the races. Of course.......the "little people" did not hear a word about this story till later in the afternoon. In fact until the last hour or two.......NO ONE was reporting this at all. Even now this.......MAJOR STORY........is hard to find on most business or other sites. AND.......considering the source......who knows if any of this is REMOTELY true. (just my personal opinion) I guess we will find out in a few weeks.
With news of unemployment numbers less than 1 million, and the possibility of a vaccine in October, you would have expected the market to go up. I guess everyone got very vulgar acts committed upon their accounts today.
Gonna wait and see how markets are shaping today. Being that it’s Friday something tells me it will close in the red, if so I’ll add up more to my positions by the last hour and hope for a clean new start on Tuesday
I am with YOU.....Zukodany. My family members wire funds......$410,000......showed up in their account last night. SO......I will put half into the 2 funds and half into the 12 stocks that are in my Portfolio Model and in the REAL accounts that I manage. I will do the trades......all in all at once.....TODAY. The $205,000 that is going into the 2 funds.........Fidelity Contra and SP500 Index.......will invest at the close today. So if the markets go down through the day I will get the benefit of that when those funds invest. I will put the $210,000 into the 12 stocks some time after the open, probably some time this morning, once I see how the morning and open is going. The futures are showing a positive open......but....I do not expect a positive close today. For any that are NOT familiar with my Portfolio Model......it is in the post below this one......I re-post it periodically since I talk about it regularly in this thread.
