Tag Income Investing

Market Crash Lessons

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What Next?

I’m trying to encourage my kids to save & invest while they are young. As usual, Dad’s advice turns to muck pretty much right off the bat. The markets tanked. I tell them, with great confidence & authority, that it’s just noise. To keep on saving & investing. That they’re just buying the good stuff on sale now. Listen to Dad.

There are lots of experts out there with advice on how to handle market losses. I must admit, I’m not one of them. I failed my biggest test back during the dot-com crash. I sold off all but one of my holdings then. The only one I held onto went to zero. All the stocks I sold would have made me money. Had I held onto them! What do you think I learned from that experience?

Stay out of the market, it’s just a lottery? Yeah, I did that for a while. Too long a while. But no, that’s not it … the lesson I seem to have learned is to be afraid of selling anything!

Nowadays, rather than chase what’s hot, I buy what’s not. Most of my investments are in bigger, bluer, dividend-growth companies. Or in ETFs that hold companies like that. But that doesn’t make a downward spiral any more enjoyable. Turns out big blue-chips can go down too. I have the same dilemma today: I don’t know if I should sell, hold, or buy more. Not knowing, I do what I do best … nothing! My stocks just sit there, showing red, & I do nothing. The automatic DRIP adds new shares on dividend pay days. I don’t need to do anything with that either.

I have neither the quant skills nor the psychic ability to figure out what happens next in the market. Instead, I’m trying to get more comfortable just doing nothing. It reminds me of the few times in my career where the future of my employment was at risk. When I lost my jobs back then, I had no other sources of income. But I survived. Between the individual stocks & ETFs I own today, I own little pieces of hundreds of companies. What are the chances they’ll all fire me at the same time & kill the dividends? Pretty slim, I think.
What are the chances that they’ll all go to zero? While there are no guarantees, that’s pretty unlikely too.

For a lazy & conflicted investor like me, it was almost a relief when I came round to thinking that doing nothing might be best. I still worry every time I see the market drop further. I wish I could just stop looking. I can’t. But, so far, I’m sticking with the do nothing strategy.

Only time will tell if if I can keep on doing that. And if that was the right thing to do. Especially for the sake of my kids! 😜

Dreams of Being Rich!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy 1 Comment
Wake up!

Okay, this is just one of those dreams I can’t make sense of. No, not the dream of being rich, but an actual dream I had last night. One that I can’t make sense of. I’m not making this up, I really had this dream last night & I think you’ll be tickled with the kicker at the end of the story.

I like to read my way to sleep but I happened to listen to an audio book last night. It’s a book on a high-yielding, income-fund investing strategy. This is an investing approach that I don’t really buy into. But that’s why I need to learn more about it, I could be wrong. It might work for a chunk of a retiree’s portfolio, so maybe I’ll want to use it down the road. I was pausing the book periodically, to jump over to the browser on my phone. I compared the total returns of some of the recommended funds against those of one of the Canadian banks. And that’s about when I fell asleep …

Now I’m at my dream-desk. I had a list of four funds that I wanted to compare & I was reviewing these on screen when I was introduced to a new employee. Next thing you know, I’m sharing a sheet of paper with the new guy. It started out with the ticker symbols of the four funds on it, but now it is a list of four of my brilliant suggestions for design improvements on a reflow oven. A reflow oven is a big, industrial version of the oven you might find in sub sandwich restaurant. You know the kind with the flat conveyor belt? It toasts those open-faced sandwiches.

Anyhoo, an industrial reflow oven solders electronic components onto printed circuit boards. It’s one of the machines that helps manufacture the electronics inside your phone, TV, laptop, & so on. This machine has been part of my day job for decades already. I probably know more about reflow ovens than I do about investing in high-yielding funds! I’m talking about my brilliant ideas with the new guy & I invite him to join me at a meeting I’ve scheduled to share these suggestions with the engineering department.

Next thing I’m sitting in the meeting room opening up my laptop. The new guy is sitting to my left & … wait for it … Warren Buffett is sitting to my right. I’m not kidding, I dreamed of Mr. Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha himself! We’re all waiting for the design engineer to show up for the meeting. As I open my laptop, I glance out the window. I don’t know why I’m not surprised that the office window is looking out over the park in the small Irish town I grew up in!

The design engineer finally shows up. A tall, smiling man. With his shaven head, he looked more like a martial artist than any design engineer I’d ever worked with. He is 6″ 8″ tall & I have to look up, a lot, as I shake his hand. His name is Do, but pronounced dough! I introduce him to the new guy, whose name I couldn’t drag back from dreamland, but Mr. Buffett needed no introduction. I guess we were used to working together! LOL

I fired up my laptop & was about to review the list of the four items with the group, but then the recollection fades.

Bummer!

After a solid eight hours of sleep, I woke up. Exhausted. I took my morning coffee out to the balcony, in the dark, & tried to gather as many threads of the dream as I could. But, try as I might, I could not remember if The Oracle had passed judgement on the four ticker symbols on my list. I finally gave up & carried on with my daily ritual. I usually play the day’s Wordle® game as I enjoy my coffee.

You won’t believe the word that proved to be today’s solution to the Wordle® puzzle!

And I’m not telling you the answer!
Go to The New York Times Wordle® website & play it yourself.

And then tell me that isn’t just weirdly, wonderfully, mystical … or something.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to buy these funds when the markets open. Or run away screaming!

Okay, if you don’t play the game, just search for Wordle® #337 online for the answer.