The Long Term Investor

GREAT NEWS Emmett.......you can add more to your retirement. BUMMER about the Stockaholics clause.

 

Personally SPUD......I get more accurate news and reporting from The Simpsons.......and.....South Park.

 

NO doubt the media will scour the world for other failing banks.........that have been in trouble for months if not years.....and tomorrow there will be SCREAMING headlines about another group of banks that are contagion from SVB.

 

OK......make me some money tomorrow. I will miss the entire day on Thursday.

I need to get up and leave to drive to the city where I have a meeting with museum staff and museum management to try to get everything lined up to do an Exhibition of an artist that I collect. I have been prepping for the meeting today and am ready to go. This is the initial meeting to discuss the theme of the exhibition, fund raising, etc, etc, etc. I will be meeting with the museum President, the CEO, two curators, and museum staff. Outsiders will be me and a curator for a major collection that I brought on board for the possible exhibition.

 

I had a HUGE gain today........9 of 10 stocks very much in the green. My single loser today.......HD. I got a beat on the SP500 by 0.75%.

You guys really hit it out of the ballpark in managing the markets today while I was gone.

 

My museum visit and meeting really went well today. We are moving on to the next step in the exhibition process.......submission to the museum committee. Everyone was very enthusiastic.

 

I have been UP for the past four days in a row. i am looking forward to tomorrow to see if I can make it five in a row.

 

How true.

Government fear-mongering over Silicon Valley Bank — and how to profit

https://nypost.com/2023/03/15/government-fear-mongering-over-silicon-valley-bank-and-how-to-profit/

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

"A week ago, traders were pricing in a Fed rate hike of 50 basis points at its March 22 meeting. Now, after all the bank failure fears, I have no idea what the Fed will do.

But whatever the Fed does, I bet it spews more chaos than calm.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — government finance’s version of Anthony Fauci — loudly proclaimed on Saturday that the feds wouldn’t bail out Silicon Valley Bank.

On Sunday, however, they announced jointly with the Fed and FDIC that they were bailing out SVB’s depositors — although not the shareholders or creditors — while insisting it wasn’t a bailout at all.

Inconsistency instills fear.

The media says SVB’s failure was the second-biggest ever and that New York-based Signature Bank’s was the third-biggest. Scary. But they weren’t really No. 2 and No. 3.

Yes, SVB was $200 billion-plus in deposits, and they are No. 2 measured that way. But in relevant economic impact — what really matters — SVB, for example, was only about 4% as big relative to the economy’s size in 2023 versus what Bank of the United States was when it failed in 1931.



The US, in recent decades, has given more bank loans and deposits to small banks.
Federal Reserve, FactSet

That’s despite the fact that SVB was roughly 1,000 times bigger in dollars than New York’s Bank of the United States.

Nominal GDP (not inflation-adjusted) growth since then accounts for the difference. Relative to contemporary GDP, Signature and SVB were smaller than 1984’s Continental Illinois failure — relative pimples, not huge hemorrhages.

Britain’s finance minister Jeremy Hunt, boasting that the UK saved the roughly 3% of SVB’s assets parked there, claimed that if they hadn’t stepped in, “strategically important (UK) companies would ‘be wiped out.’”

Such statements instill fear. But name one UK company that would have been wiped out. You can’t. He can’t, either.

President Biden said failing bank managements should be fired. Again — scary. But when?

If upper management had been fired last weekend the FDIC would have had nobody to talk to at SVB to enable customers to redeem deposits. Chaos would reign.

Later, Mr. President, on that firing blather.

SVB’s main problem? Its depositor base was way too concentrated in firms and employees from the venture capital realm.

When VCs started urging their portfolio firms last Thursday to pull their SVB deposits before others might, it launched the “run” on SVB from among those firms, employees, families and friends.


US commerical loans and deposits have decreased in recent years.

Almost no American bank has nearly so concentrated a depositor base as SVB. First Republic Bank — same size as SVB with a heavy geographic overlap, but with a far more diversified depositor base by industry — fell heavily Friday and early Monday because of all the fear.

But then it stabilized then soared.

Banks use deposits to fund long-term loans which fall in value when long-term interest rates rise — as they did from 2023’s rising inflation fears.

SVB’s marginal balance sheet couldn’t take it as of last week. Ironically, 10-year rates have just now fallen by 0.5% —actually now down a bit overall in 2023. SVB got caught in between.

Most banks don’t because of their diverse depositor base.

Big banks are in far better financial shape than small ones.

But, overall banks are close to the best condition, (measured by total loans relative to assets) in my 50-plus year professional investing career.

Stocks are up this year as I expected but down since February.

There is lots I don’t know—like where stocks will be in 45 days.

I do know that once you get to bank failures, stocks are hugely higher two years later.

Sentiment shows (like comments to my March 5 column) overwhelming negativity and fear.

As Warren Buffett said, “You should be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

Be greedy. "

MY COMMENT

The RAMPANT fear mongering over banks is still out of control....although people are starting to tune it all out. Most of the media attention was a very well orchestrated PR campaign to get a bailout for the Silicon Valley Elites and the companies they invest in. That is my view. Probably not the majority view on here....but that is ok.

As in any media crisis.......this event was a HUGE opportunity for smart medium term investors to make good money. Emphasis on the word....."smart"......you have to really do your research and buy beaten down QUALITY.

 

Here is another little article from Fisher (the one above is also)......which I like. they seem to have a very good handle on common sense and a long term investing perspective. (not that I am recommending them or any other advisor on here)

Putting the Regional Bank Scare Into Perspective

https://www.fisherinvestments.com/e...ting-the-regional-bank-scare-into-perspective

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

"The banking system is healthier than perceived.

Editors’ Note: MarketMinder doesn’t make individual security recommendations. The below merely represent a broader theme we wish to highlight.

One week after Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) first spooked markets with plans to raise capital and book big losses on its Treasury portfolio, investors’ angst hasn’t died down. SIVB officially failed Friday. Another regional bank, Signature Bank, followed suit Saturday. On Sunday, the Fed pumped liquidity to smaller regional banks and guaranteed all deposits above the FDIC’s deposit insurance ceiling ($250,000). But talk of contagion and the hunt for the next domino to fall continued, sending US bank stocks sharply lower this week. But our research suggests the banking system is overall quite healthy, and this storm too should pass before long, with stocks rebounding faster than most anyone envisions now.

Very few people think the failures of SIVB and Signature alone will cause a deep downturn. Though described as the second- and third-largest bank failures in history, this is accurate only if you don’t adjust for inflation or scale relative to GDP. Depression-era failures were far, far larger once you do that math. No, the main fear now is contagion—that bank runs will spread to other similarly sized institutions, culminating in a national financial meltdown. Tellingly, smaller regional banks have taken a disproportionately large hit over the last week, and credit ratings agency Moody’s put six on notice for a potential downgrade. Deposits are reportedly fleeing for the four largest, so-called “too big to fail” US banks.

In our view, this narrative glosses over a couple of important factors. One: The US banking system is extremely well capitalized. Tier 1 capital—the highest-quality buffer—is well above regulatory minimums and miles above its level before 2007 – 2009’s global financial crisis. Meanwhile, loan-to-deposit ratios are below pretty much any point in the last 50 years, showing banks have far greater capability to meet withdrawal requests without dumping illiquid assets than headlines are giving them credit for now. Smaller banks do have less cash as a percentage of total assets than large banks do, but the Fed’s new liquidity program should help with this.

Two, SIVB and Signature Bank don’t represent the broader regional banking system. Signature ballooned on the cryptocurrency industry, putting it in hot water after crypto crashed. SIVB was largely created by the venture capital (VC) world to serve the VC world—the funds and partners as well as their portfolio companies and their employees, customers and friends. Many funding deals included banking with SIVB as a condition. It was that structure, not simply being a midsized regional bank, that brought it down. It meant SIVB was overly exposed to Tech and Tech-like companies—particularly the younger ones with higher cash-burn rates. As the startup world hit tough sledding last year, these companies drew down cash reserves to continue funding operations. Meanwhile, the US Treasury bonds on SIVB’s balance sheet fell in value as interest rates rose, eroding its capital. That culminated in the planned capital raise, which might have worked had the VCs not told their portfolio companies to pull their money before everyone else did. It all turned into a very rapid, sudden run on SIVB’s deposits. And with the bonds on its balance sheet down tied to rising rates, the company needed capital pretty desperately.

But don’t other banks own Treasury bonds? Yes. But there are caveats to this. For one, SIVB carried an unusually high percentage of its assets in fixed-rate, longer-term securities, making it particularly exposed to rising rates. And this is where accounting rules come into play. Banks can designate assets as either Available for Sale (AFS) or Hold to Maturity (HTM). AFS is for the most liquid assets—those banks can sell to meet cash needs. Hence, they are marked to the most recently observed market value. HTM is for the less liquid, harder to value assets that banks don’t intend to sell and are therefore at less risk of realizing losses on. Therefore, they are no longer marked to market for regulatory capital purposes. This is in contrast to 2008, when then-prevailing rules dictated that even illiquid assets banks had no intent of trading had to be marked to market. As long-term interest rates rise and Treasury bond values fall, banks can move holdings from AFS to HTM to avoid the mark-to-market capital hit. Doing so is a tradeoff, since it sacrifices liquidity, but most banks had enough of a cushion to do it. SIVB didn’t, leading to last week’s announcement that it would firesale over $20 billion worth of Treasurys at a $1.8 billion loss.

Despite SIVB and Signature Bank’s unique issues, we aren’t ruling out more failures. Bank runs are psychological events, and sometimes rumors trump reason. The Fed, as ever, seemed to sow more chaos than confidence. The decision to bail out uninsured deposits will likely reverberate for years to come and could be a watershed moment. We have plenty of thoughts on it and will share those soon. But in the very short term, while easing fears of startups (strangely and suddenly cast as local small businesses rather than companies with several dozen employees and bigtime venture funding) not making payroll this week, it sets the expectation that the Fed and Treasury will guarantee uninsured depositors at any other failed institution. They claimed their move won’t cost taxpayers a cent, and the largest banks will pay for it via a special surcharge. But banks are pretty good at passing these things on to customers.

As for the liquidity program, its structure seems beneficial enough. It lets banks get short-term loans using their AFS portfolios as collateral—but at par values, not market values. Essentially, this means banks can convert their AFS portfolios to cash without selling and taking losses. On paper it should help bridge any gaps that arise. But whenever the Fed creates new programs like this, it gives the impression that they see a massive problem, which can heighten panic. That seemed to be at play this week. If that continues, deposits keep fleeing and a few more banks go under, the fear factor could linger. Lending could also take a hit if banks decide a dollar in reserve is better than a dollar lent, so we will be watching loan growth data closely as they come out each week. Furthermore, the response here raises the question once again about how regulators approach banks that encounter trouble. Post-2008 regulation was intended to fix this, but alas, that doesn’t seem to have happened. Already there are calls for more regulation—which could create uncertainty. We are monitoring that aspect of the story closely.

In the very near term, volatility could persist—both to the downside and upside. But whether or not a new bear market low lies ahead, the conditions seem ripe for a new bull market. Pessimism reigns. Most banks are in excellent shape. The system has abundant liquidity. The stronger many can absorb the troubled few. Reacting to the latest troubles and recent returns means locking in those drawdowns and reducing exposure to the inevitable recovery. No one ever built or maintained wealth by selling low and buying high. Discipline and patience will likely win out in the end, in our view."

MY COMMENT

"Discipline and patience will likely win out in the end".........how true.

It is also true that this little event once again shows that the FED and government dont have any PLAN. They simply LURCH from crisis to crisis.....from economic report to economic report. Regulations dont matter, rules dont matter......Like the FDIC deposit limit of $250,000......they are thrown out at the spur of the moment when something happens. NONE of this instills any confidence in government, the FED, banks, or the country.

Meanwhile the media cheer-leads the PANIC....with gleeful, dishonest, headlines and speculative opinion.....with not even a hint of.......actually.....reporting the news. It is all National Inquirer......."alien visits White House......reporting now not even trying to masquerade as news reporting.

This is why the markets LURCH from event to event......and....none of them seem to last more than a couple of weeks before the next.....BREATHLESS....topic.

This is NOT how I invest and is NOT what I care about.......and....NEVER will be. Although at some point we will reach a TIPPING POINT where the markets are so disconnected from reality......they will be useless and nothing more than gambling. At that point in time........stock and fund investing will no longer be a rational way for most Americans to secure their future. The markets and investing will simply be......DEAD. Once this happens......going back to how it used to be......will NEVER happen.

 

And to continue on this little theme.

Investors Need To Ignore The Doomsayers Driven By Turmoil

https://www.fa-mag.com/news/investo...doomsayers-driven-by-turmoil-72422.html?print

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

"When financial markets teeter, as they have since 2022 began, there’s no shortage of speculation about where they are headed. Morgan Stanley warned recently that March could be a brutal month for stocks. One financial adviser echoed that sentiment, telling Bloomberg News that “there will be a lot of volatility in the markets” and “lots of chances to put cash to work at attractive levels.” The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has further fueled speculation about interest rates, bank stocks and the impact on broader markets.

The problem is no one has any clue what markets will do in the near term. But nothing grabs investors’ attention like a shaky market and an old-fashioned bank run, giving financial firms and the commentariat an opportunity to peddle their products and broaden their fame, mostly by sowing fear of declining markets and looming financial crises. And why not? Once the hysteria fades, no one remembers who said what anyway.

The chatter would be entertaining if it weren’t so costly. Too many investors act on the unreliable predictions they hear, often by selling their investments and hiding in cash until the talk dies down, eventually buying back the same investment at a price higher than the one at which they sold it.

The S&P Regional Banks Select Industry Index, a collection of about 140 regional banks, tumbled 30% from its February peak through Monday, more than two-thirds of the decline coming in the last three trading days on news of SVB’s collapse. The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF, a fund that tracks S&P’s index, experienced a surge in trading volume during those three days, presumably because investors scrambled to dump their shares. Watch them buy back those same shares after prices recover.

That’s what investors do routinely. Morningstar’s latest Mind the Gap report finds that investors earned about 1.7 percentage points less than the total returns their fund investments generated over 10 years through 2021. The gap, Morningstar finds, “stems from poorly timed purchases and sales of fund shares, which cost investors nearly one-sixth the return they would have earned if they had simply bought and held.”

So it’s a particularly good time to remind investors that the most reliable way to grow their money is to invest in a low-cost, broadly diversified portfolio, ignore predictions and hang on through the inevitable ups and downs.

The investing part is easier than it sounds. The first step is to strike a balance between stocks and bonds. Almost everyone will want both stocks and bonds in their portfolio, the stocks for growth and the bonds for stability. In general, the more stocks, the higher the expected return and volatility, and inversely, the more bonds, the lower the expected return and volatility.

The historical record is instructive. In the table below, I show the annualized total return for a variety of stock/bond portfolios using the historical performance of the S&P 500 Index and long-term US government bonds back to 1926. I also estimate, based on stocks and bonds’ historical volatility, how much the portfolios are likely to decline in a panic like the 2008 financial crisis or the onset of Covid-19. (For finance geeks, the drawdowns represent a three-sigma deviation from the mean return using the annualized standard deviation of monthly total returns.)

A few things to note. First, the drawdowns indicate volatility, not permanent loss. US markets have always recovered after declines and moved on to new highs. There’s no reason to think that a broadly diversified portfolio, including a globally diversified one, will behave differently going forward. Still, volatility should be taken seriously. The greater the drawdown, the greater the danger of selling in a panic and locking in losses. Bigger drawdowns also result in deeper losses if investors need to pull money from their portfolio in a downturn.

Second, the historical record is more useful for gauging the trade-off between return and volatility than as a precise measure of future return and volatility. That’s not to say the historical numbers have no predictive power. In fact, when looking at older US data or numbers from around the world, the results are roughly the same. With some variation, long-term investors are likely to achieve results similar to those in the historical record. But whatever the result, a higher return will almost always come at the cost of deeper drawdowns.

Third, investment returns are more modest than generally acknowledged, particularly after inflation, which is likely to erode them by 2% to 3% a year over the long term. The dirty secret of finance, despite all the bravado to the contrary, is that money grows slowly. Institutional investors, such as pensions and endowments, generally grow their money at about 7% to 8% a year before inflation, in line with a balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds. In my experience, investors rarely do better and more often do worse, as Morningstar cautions. But even a modest 7% return can have a big impact over time, multiplying money more than 12 times over 50 years after inflation.

The trick is to start early. There are many low-cost exchange-traded funds that track broad baskets of stocks and bonds. Once you have yours picked out, along with your preferred stock-bond allocation, don’t wait to get started. It’s tempting to put off investing, to rationalize that there will be a better time to buy, particularly with all the scary talk about markets right now. On the contrary, the best time to buy is during a downturn, when everything is on sale.

In an ideal world, financial pundits would encourage people to invest regularly and remain invested. But let’s face it, smart investing is boring, and boring doesn’t sell. So don’t expect the yapping to go away; just learn to ignore it."

MY COMMENT

YES......the YAPPERS are out in full force last year and this year. That is the ........."NEW NORMAL".....of the investing world. Nothing to do with actual investing.....all about distorting reality and the markets.

 

It must be a very scary and impossible to understand time for people that are young and/or considering becoming an investor for the first time. HERE is what I told my kids.

First....there is only one way for most people to have any hope to achieve security and wealth for their family....that is through long term stock and fund investing.

Second.....get over the FEAR of taking that first step. You dont have to be "educated", you dont have to be good in math or with computers, there is no science to it, you dont have to be some sort of genius. You simply have to have common sense and long term focus.

Third.......the hardest thing you will ever face investing....is taking the first step.

Forth....you dont have to reinvent the wheel. For most people simply investing their long term savings in a SP500 Index ETF at a big broker like Schwab, or Vanguard, or Fidelity, etc, is ALL you have to do.

Fifth.....sign up for a monthly deduction from your checking account so you are investing in your ETF......every month. This gives you the discipline to NOT come up with excuses why you will do it....."next month". PAY YOURSELF FIRST.

Sixth.....never trade, never jump in and out, never gamble with the markets, never try to time the markets......just sit and wait and DO NOTHING other than continue to add money to your account EVERY MONTH.

Seventh......it really is that simple.

Eighth........understand long term compounding and the rule of 72's. The YOUNGER you start the better you will do.....MASSIVELY

Ninth.....do it for "YOU".....do you want to retire earlier? Do you want to have a good life? Do you want to make your family secure? Do you want to help your kids in life? Do you want to travel or do other aspects of life that you enjoy? Do you want to be free of fear and worry over money? This is how you do it and how it starts.

it is that simple......YOU CAN DO IT AND YOU CAN START TODAY.

Every single person on this board.....all the posters.....EVERYONE....started with NO KNOWLEDGE of investing. You are no different than anyone on here.......YOU CAN DO IT. You just have to take that first step.

 

Seems like a normal day by recent short term standards today. I have watched the averages since the open...but...have not paid any attention to the markets. I simply dont care about what is driving the short term markets right now. It is not relevant to me as a long term investor.

In SPITE of all the news.....I have been UP for each of the past four days. Looks like my streak might end today. BUT.....I have done very well during this little event.

I see the positive.....beyond how nicely I have done in my accounts. The FED has been knocked down some. Rate hikes are now going to less dramatic. Government has been kicked in the face....in addition to the gridlock. Treasury rates have been knocked back and stifled for a while. the worthless economic data obsession has been lessened some. Etc, etc, etc.

 

Something most people dont think much about.

Big changes in the S&P 500 Friday highlight the power of index providers

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/17/big...riday-highlight-power-of-index-providers.html

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

"The index gurus are at it again. Some of the best-known stocks are getting reclassified on Friday, and that means a lot of money is going to move around.

Ever wonder why Walmart is classified as a consumer staples stock in the S&P 500, but similar retailers such as Target, Dollar General and Dollar Tree are classified as consumer discretionary stocks? A lot of other people have wondered as well.

Friday, that will change.

Target, Dollar General and Dollar Tree will move from the consumer discretionary corner of the stock market, and join Walmart as consumer staples companies.

Consumer staples will get bigger; consumer discretionary will get a little smaller.

Ever wonder why Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, which seem like they’re financials, are actually listed as Technology stocks instead?

Other people have wondered that as well.

On Friday, that too will change.

Visa, Mastercard and Paypal, along with a few other names, will be moved into the financials sector.

As a result, technology will be a little smaller, financials a little bigger.

The triumph of indexing: where a stock is placed matters

Thirty years ago this would all have been of interest to academics, but almost no one else.

That was before the triumph of indexing and exchange-traded funds.

Today, there is $6 trillion directly indexed to just the S&P 500, the largest of all the indexes in the amount of money tied to it. There is trillions more that is indirectly indexed. That is, many funds use the S&P as a bogey and try to match their returns without paying a licensing fee to Standard & Poor’s.

Regardless: $6 trillion is a lot of money. It’s about 18% of the entire market capitalization of the S&P 500.

And that’s just the S&P 500. There are thousands of indexes that slice and dice the stock and bond market in endless ways.

Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), which began 30 years ago, enable investors to buy these indexes in a low-cost, tax-advantaged wrapper that can be traded on an intraday basis. The ETF business in the U.S. alone is about $7 trillion, most of it in passive (indexed) funds.

The people who issue those ETFs (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Schwab and a handful of others), for the most part, do not own the indexes that are behind the ETFs. They license those indexes from index providers. The largest are Standard & Poor’s, MSCI, and FTSE Russell (which is owned by the London Stock Exchange Group).

And the people who manage what goes in, and comes out of those indexes have now become very influential.

How the stock classification system works

Ever wonder why we use odd phrases like “consumer discretionary” and “communication services” to describe different parts of the stock market?

You can thank S&P and MSCI.

In 1999, in an effort to standardize how stocks are classified, MSCI and Standard & Poor’s set up an industry benchmark called the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS).

All major public companies are broken down into one of 11 sectors, 24 industry groups, 69 industries and 158 sub-industries. The weighting in the most important index, the S&P 500, is determined by market capitalization.

Here’s the current weighting of sectors in the S&P 500:

Sectors in the S&P 500
(weighting)

• Technology 27%
• Health Care 14%
• Financials 12%
• Consumer Discretionary 11%
• Industrials 9%
• Communication Services 8%
• Consumer Staples 7%
• Energy 5%
• Utilities 3%
• REITs 3%
• Materials 2%

Source: FactSet

Every year in March, S&P and MSCI announce changes in the classification system. This year, the changes set in motion last year take place on March 17th.

Among the notable shifts this year, an entire sub-industry of technology, called “data & processing & outsourced services,” and including Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal, moves to financials and will now be called “transaction and service processing services.”

Separately, S&P and MSCI are recognizing that Target, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree all sell similar merchandise to WalMart, so they’re all going under the same consumer staples umbrella.

What’s it mean for investors?

If you’re an investor in a broadly diversified total market index fund like the S&P 500, the changes will make little difference to you.

The changes will be more significant if you trade sectors, which is an increasingly popular strategy. Just look at all the money that moved around in bank stocks this week, much of which went through the SPDR S&P Bank ETF(KBE

Moving Target, Dollar General and Dollar Tree to consumer staples from consumer discretionary will increase the weighting (and alter the future performance) of consumer staples, and lower the weighting (and alter the future performance) of consumer discretionary.

Likewise with financials and technology: Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal will go into financials, which will increase the weighting (and change the future performance) of financials, and decrease the weighting of technology.

The net effect: technology’s weight in the S&P will drop from roughly 27.7% to 24.5%, while the weighting of financials will expand from 11.5% to 14.2%.

“The key is making sure these indices are relevant,” Dan Draper, CEO of S&P Dow Jones Indices, at S&P Global, said in a recent interview on CNBC’s ETF Edge. “Are they reflecting changes in consumer demand or the changes in the marketplace structure?”

Here’s something else it reflects: the people who decide what goes in these indexes have become very influential. They are not fund managers, they are index providers, but don’t let that fool you: in a world where people buy funds that are tied to indexes, the people who determine what go into those indexes have become very powerful indeed."

MY COMMENT

Interesting. I have never really thought about this.

 

As the markets wallow around in self-pity, fear, and short term weekend avoidance.....I am far above the loss on the SP500 today. Yes......I have a loss right now in my account.....but it is extremely SMALL. I have four stocks that are UP right now that are really helping me today......MSFT, NVDA, HD, and GOOGL.

In spite of the short term drams....or perhaps even because of it....my year to date GAIN in my account is at 10.9%....as of about three minutes ago.

I say......"because of it".....because my BIG CAP focused portfolio has a level of saftey that my stocks give when there is uncertainty. That is one of the big reasons that I focus on BIG CAP. ICONIC, GREAT MANAGEMENT, WORLD WIDE MARKETING, DOMINANT, companies when I invest.