Inflation Aware Investing
You know the old saying, “What goes up must come down.” Currently everything seems to be going up at the same time.
You know the old saying, “What goes up must come down.” Currently everything seems to be going up at the same time.
As the NCAA tournament wraps up, many sports fans are reflecting on their brackets, winning their office pools, and bragging rights with friends. Similarly, others focus on their investments and trying to predict which stocks will perform the best. We may think of these as two separate worlds, but there are numerous similarities between the two.
The month of January was marked by negative returns for global stock markets. But, as the well-worn phrase, “Is your glass half full or half empty?” implies, our view of, or the way we feel about the state of markets as investors, may be more related to our personal dispositions than what the numbers indicate.
Many of my favorite content pieces from 2020 reflect on the themes of uncertainty, risk, change, and remaining optimistic in the face of unsettling circumstances.
Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money, spent some time with us last month. Here are my takeaways.
Sometimes headlines are right, but remember they are created to get your attention, not necessarily to provide you with helpful information.
2022 was a historically painful year as an investor with stock markets experiencing a bear market, and bond markets having one of their worst years ever. However, as we enter 2023, I’d like to consider the positives.
What caused the stock market to rise by over 20% in the second quarter of 2020 even as the COVID pandemic was out of control? How about the over 11% rise in the fourth quarter of 2021 as inflation ticked up and the Fed was warning of rate increases? It seems a little more obvious why the US stock market has fallen in the first 6 months of 2022, but should it have fallen more…or less?
Risks can often feel much different to retirees. The overarching risk for retirees is that something takes place that results in a permanently lower standard of living. Retirement researcher, Wade Pfau, has identified three major categories of risk for one’s income in retirement.
On March 23, 2020, the S&P 500 tumbled another 3%, culminating a near 34% drop over that same month. The Dow Jones hovered around 19,000. Gains from the past few years were gone.
Pictures and video coming from Ukraine are difficult to watch. As humans, we may be angered and ask, “How can I help?” In investing, typically the best thing to do in the moments when we are most tempted to do “something,” is simply to sit still.
When the going is good, we’re not all that concerned with asking or answering the question. It is when the going gets tough, like right now, that we find ourselves more interested in asking. So, “What should we do?”
Imagine that you fell asleep at the beginning of the year and woke up at the end of 2020. When you wake up, there are some things that would immediately feel different.