Tag stock market

Investing is so Exciting, eh!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Going to the Moon?

When I assumed control of my own portfolio during the pandemic, nobody told me how exciting it was going to be. Buying & selling stocks & ETFs, watching the numbers go up & down, checking out colourful little charts & graphs, it’s all great fun. Way more fun than getting fake coins for completing a crossword puzzle app on my phone. I must have missed my game time though, because I bought some crypto. Now I could carry on watching fake coins on an app, just like before. But without having all the pressure of figuring out which letters I needed to make a word. Crypto wasn’t that much fun though. I didn’t get the idea behind this game. So I sold them & bought these other stocks where you can win dividend coins. Every now & then, these coins just tumble in out of nowhere. Even when you have no idea what you’re doing. It’s great!

Investing is a fun game. I’m still learning & I don’t know all the rules yet. Is it better to own single stock warriors or little ETF armies? What does it mean when the numbers turn red? Am I trying to get the squiggly line to go up or down? Are we supposed to make mountain shapes with the lines? I think the overall objective of the game is to beat “the Market”. The Market is like the evil empire & if you beat the market, you get treasure.

That should be easy, no!

Why?

Because social media & 24 hour stock market channels provide an endless supply of expert advice now. And it’s free. What other game do you play that has it’s own TV channels? It’d be crazy not to take advantage of all that free wisdom, right? Though I must admit, they’re messing with my head a bit. One says buy this, the other says not. Next week, they both reverse what they said last week. Is this some clever gaming strategy? It takes a while to get used to a new game. To understand all the tricks & sly moves that get you ahead. But I have noticed that if you buy anything that a rich & famous person buys, you usually get a great result. Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to buy the right armour & weapons stocks before the famous guy does. That’s a good strategy, right?

It’s the same with all these games though. Kids learn much faster & play much better than us slightly older folk. Kids were getting rich buying these funny game company stocks. And that silly fake-money coin. While I was still trying to work out what to do with those dividend coins. I also didn’t know what bonds were. Was that like some kind of protective potion that you could drink when your stock warriors were under attack? Experts say older people should have a lot of bonds.

Anyway, I was too busy learning about how to attack the market with my stock icons, so I was late to the game buying a few bond ETFs. I know I should have spent more time looking into the powers of the bond potion but, so far, they blow. I’ll just park them in the corner for now & worry about them later. Though most of my stock icons are pretty boring too. All the exciting icons are with the high-flying gamers. This year however, they seem to be flying below my boring stocks. I’m guessing this is another strategy I haven’t figured out yet. Maybe they fly below to look for weak spots in the underbelly of my stodgy stocks? I might pick up a few of those high-flyers now. I don’t know what else to do with those dividend coins.

Back when I had advisors, the market would usually beat me. Except, sometimes, when I lost money. In years when I lost coins, they’d tell me that we (meaning the advisor & me) didn’t lose as much as the market. And that this was a very good thing. It was, I agreed. When the market was up, I didn’t think it was quite so good when the market beat “us”. But I learned that was normal & that we weren’t trying to beat the market. I’m good with that too. But I can’t believe I used to pay advisors to do all this fun stuff for me. They were having all the fun playing the game & I was paying them to play for me. It’s almost like paying someone to go out & have a nice dinner for you. And on you!

Now I have all the fun myself. I’m pretty sure I won’t beat the market either. But it costs me nothing extra to play now. And I can try to not lose as much as the market when things are down. Though I know I’ll miss those fireside consolation chats I had with my advisors when things sucked. Gaming solo can be lonely.

If I lose all my coins, I’m truly shagged. But I gotta say … so far … it’s been a whole lotta fun using a little money learning how to play the game.

Let’s see if I’m still enjoying the game as much by the time the next heroic bull emerges to battle the market.

Game on! 😜

10 Ways to be an Expert Investor on Social Media!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Pennies & Nonsense!

#10 … Post links to recently announced company results. If you can get off the mark early here, this makes you look smarter than the rest of the pack.

#9 … Quote well-known, high-visibility investing superstars. Often! And you can’t go wrong citing investing legends like Warren Buffett & Jack Bogle.

#8 … Criticise those well-known investing superstars who have hit a slump. They fell into a hole that you didn’t. You’ll look way smarter for having avoided the dumb mistake that the superstar didn’t.

#7 … Cite highbrow investing papers that say most experts cannot match market performance, most of the time. The softly veiled implication being that maybe you can!

#6 … Sound really confident about your recent investment. Justify it with musings on the balance sheet, book value & cashflow. But make sure it doesn’t look like you’re pumping the stock. Classic desperate expert mistake.

#5 … Pump crypto! Nobody has a clue what’s going on with this crap. And you can’t really be criticised for holding a belief in crypto as the new gold. That’s kinda like saying you can’t be feeling what you’re feeling. That’s a big no-no with investing snowflakes these days!

#4 … Talk about having a well-diversified portfolio. Maybe even recommend an ETF or two. Especially one that dilutes your home country bias. Unless, of course, you are really kicking the market’s ass with a focused strategy.

#3 … And if you do have that winning strategy to brag about, go ahead … brag. If you dare! But be ready to run for cover when your red hot portfolio cools. The pack will smell any lack of expertise & will socially annihilate those who screw up.

#2 … Be obscure. Use a whole bunch of big, financey, investy-sounding words. But combine them in phrases that are totally circular, meaningless, & nonsense. Like one of those touchy feely new-age books. Nobody will have a clue what you’re on about. And that makes you sound really clever. You might even be a new-age financial guru!

#1 … One of the best ways to be an expert is to circle jerk with other experts. Get some buddies who are all pumping the same philosophy & stocks that you are. When you & your buddies are all sharing the same stuff, the increase in noise makes it all seem so real. Who knows, you might even move the needle on that penny stock that you want to break even on!

Okay, I’m just having a little fun here. There are some really great investors online. Many of them sharing really good information. My problem is that I can’t figure out how to sort the good ones from the bad. And is it true that I won’t know who the real winning stock pickers are ’til years later??? When it’s all too bloody late! 😜

Who are your go-to financial gurus on social media? I’ve been unfollowing a bunch recently & I need to add some new ones. Send me your winningest gurus. And maybe a few funny ones too! 😉😁

Dividends are like Financial Vitamins for my Portfolio!

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Financial Vitamins

None of this is investing advice. In fact, I might be the worst investor you’ll ever meet. Back in the late 90s, I got caught up in the dot-com fever & became an “investor”. Along with my collection of hot stocks, my advisor at the time talked me into a few sedentary holdings. One of them was BCE Inc. (BCE). My favourite growth stock at the time was Nortel, an iconic Canadian tech company that was at the heart of the internet revolution. When the bubble burst, I sold off BCE & kept Nortel. Nortel went to zero. Had I held on to my boring telco shares, from January 1st, 2000, a 10k investment in BCE would be worth over 70k today. With the dividends reinvested. That’s an annualised return of about 9.3%. And it handsomely beats a low-cost S&P 500 index tracking fund (worth almost 47k today), over that same timeframe, by about 2% a year. That comparison includes reinvesting the fund’s (lower) dividends too.

Ignoring those dividends, just looking at the share price growth, BCE is only worth a little over half the index fund after the 21 years. Reinvesting the dividends added more than 50k to the total return. That’s quite the vitamin pill!

Fast forward 20 years & I’m working from home. During a pandemic. I surface from my basement office at lunchtime & I turn on BNN Bloomberg. The parent company of BNN Bloomberg is BCE, go figure. 😂

Anyway, I get hooked. And this becomes part of my new routine. This time, however, I manage to resist the lure of the hot stock brigade. Okay, I admit that I made a few bucks on a brief dalliance with a bitcoin ETF! I know, I know … I would have done really well if I’d stuck with it. But instead, I start looking at big, boring, dividend-paying & dividend-growing companies. I’m too old to be sweating the gyrations of the growth sector every day.

Ironically, I’m a BCE shareholder again! 🤪

I wonder if I can stay the course during the next market crash? Will I have the bottle to battle the next bear? I have no idea how this will look 20 years from now. But if it works out, & if I don’t spend it all along the way, I’m sure our kids (or maybe my favourite charity! 😜) will be grateful.

Remembering all those who served & those who continue to serve, especially in our family, on this Remembrance Day.

Work From Home Investing

Paul - The Wry Eye Guy Leave a comment
Stocks only go UP! Right!?!

This is a different topic for The Wry Eye, but I thought I’d share one of the silly things I’m playing with during my work from home experience: investing! Investing & weigh-loss have a lot in common. Both require dedication, patience, & a proven methodology. I can only hope I’ll do better with investing than with my recent weight-loss efforts, or I’ll be in real trouble! 😜
If you do some investing, let me know. Maybe we’ll swap more stories on this subject.

During the early stage of the pandemic restrictions, I moved a small, professionally managed portfolio into a self-directed account. I meant to do it years ago, but I never got around to it. The market slump in March woke me up. Unfortunately, it took weeks to get my money moved across, so I missed buying the lows. By the time I got to trade, things were on the way back up & I was too scared to invest it all at once! I worked it back into the market over the next several months.

My returns over the over past six months beat the advisor’s by a chunk. That sounds great, but it wasn’t very much money to begin with, so we’re not talking early retirement here. To be fair, the advisor had been working within my very conservative guidelines. And I got what you might expect from that guidance: very conservative returns. I have no idea why my guidelines were so conservative. And that’s the story of my investing history; half the time, I have no idea what I’m doing, nor why I’m doing it that way! My recent success was even more surprising because I was not buying the high-flying, stay-at-home, rampant tech stocks. I made most of my returns with pretty conservative stocks & boring ETFs. And now, it was all with lower fees.

I got so cocky about it all that I used a tiny portion to bet on small oil stocks, precious metals ETFs, & Bitcoin! Believe it or not, I made money on most of those too. Yes, I had a few losses, but mostly I was winning. I wondered what would happen if I did this with my real savings? Would I crush it? Maybe early retirement really was in the cards!?!
And right there, I knew it was time to stop! I sold off the stuff I didn’t understand & put the proceeds into a boring ETF.

Now that I’m an expert investor (🙄😜😁), I’ve started “educating” my kids!

It’s funny how some things are falling into different perspectives during the pandemic. I am fortunate to still have a job, but none of us knows what happens next. I’m building a list of those things I’ve left long undone. This could be a great opportunity to get some of those tasks ticked off the list.

TGIF!
Have a great weekend & PM me with your hot stock tips! LOL

PS … I am not suggesting that you go into the stock market, none of this is investing advice, this post is purely for entertainment. I’m having fun with it, but I also have some investing experience to lean on. Always seek professional advice before making your investing decisions!