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WHAT'S NEW? Our Latest Updates!

TRADE ALERT

We placed a few trades in both our model portfolios late on Friday, September 11th. The relatively minor changes were primarily to shift us out of some areas that had been hot and to add some lagging stock categories.

August 2020 Performance Review

The bubble forming in fast-growing tech stocks — notably the handful of tech near-monopolies increasingly driving the entire stock market's returns — started to burst in September, but for August it was smooth sailing for the trillion dollar-ish market cap crew.

July 2020 Performance Review

With interest rates near zero and property owners facing potentially massive problems with occupancy and rent collection, stocks are becoming the only game in town. But it is an increasingly expensive game to play.

June 2020 Performance Review

The V-shaped recovery is here—long live the V-shaped recovery! The main problem is that the actual economy and COVID-19 pandemic are not on a V-shaped recovery path—just the stock market.

May 2020 Performance Review

If your only news was stock prices, you'd never suspect that America was slowly and not very carefully emerging from one crisis only to quickly slide into another. Another headscratcher is how our stock market is currently down less for the year than other countries that have fared better during the health pandemic and economic shutdown.

April 2020 Performance Review

Stock and bond prices rebounded sharply as the trillions in Federal Reserve monetary and government fiscal spending cannons hit the market. If throwing money at the fast weakening economy turns out to be a great solution, we will win this war. If not, unfortunately we'll just have a short-term boost and a long-term mess of massive debt on top of a semi-permanently Coronavirus-slowed economy.

Trade Alert

We executed trades in both portfolios on April 3 (just over one month after our previous trades on February 28th) to cut way back on corporate bonds and deal with the cash from a liquidated inverse 3x oil ETF that the fund company shut down on March 27. This ETF returned around 90% since our buy at the end of February and at least offset huge losses in our inverse gold miners ETF (which declined significantly even though gold mining stocks were down in March). So wild were the oil swings in March that at one point when the Dow was in freefall on March 19, we were up about 379% from our buy, which did briefly offer a performance offset to our declining stock funds.

March 2020 Performance Review

The outlook for the global economy darkened amid the temporary (but not temporary enough) shutdown. Stocks tanked everywhere. At one point, the Dow was down almost 40% since the highs of mid-February, and all the gains since Trump's inauguration were destroyed.

February Performance Review

It is starting to look as if the next Black Swan for the economy and stocks is the new coronavirus making its way around the world.

Trade Alert

We made some changes to both our model portfolios on Friday 2/28/20. And while there where quite a few trades, the overall risk level from the stock bond mix hasn’t really changed significantly, more so we changed the types of stocks and bonds we wanted to be in going forward in light of some recent swings. As it turned out though, it’s a pity we didn’t increase the stock allocation much because as of Monday the stock market has been staging an amazing rebound (or dead cat bounce… only time will tell!). But then it’s typical that the highest point gain ever should come after the fastest 10% drop from a peak. Tuesday is showing markets back in the red as an emergency rate cut isn’t working. It’s that kind of a market now…