Transcript
Well, hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday, unfortunately, today was a Red Shirt Day. For those of you who haven’t watched this very often, red shirt means that the S&P 500, unfortunately was down more than one and a half percent. And it was actually down 2.45%. Today. Luckily for us, we do have an inverse position in our stock portion of the portfolio. And it’s an inverse on the S&P 500. And it went up 2.4% today, one of the reasons we put that in and it wasn’t that long ago was because the bond market really is struggling to be the parachute that I like. So in a perfect world, bonds for me are a, you know, buffer from the stock market volatility. So when the stock market falls, the bonds often would go up. And that would help.
Well, today, the stock market fell, and the bond market fell, now the bond market didn’t fall as much as the stock market. So that’s sort of a buffer and sort of a parachute. But the inverse is in there to kind of get that little run up. And, and that helped, and it helped us, you know, outperform the stock market today, you know, in our stock portion of our portfolios. And that’s a really critical thing. A couple things happen when you when you do better on down days.
Number one, it just makes it easier to recover, you know, if you lose less, you can get back to where you were a lot faster. So that’s fairly obvious. But what isn’t always so obvious is that if you are losing less than a down day, you probably have things that people are interested in, they’re not selling them as fast. So the Clean Energy piece that we had such a great run with, has been selling at a higher rate than the market, including today. And so it’s telling you people are you know, not as interested. Now, that wasn’t true, actually, back in October, and what have you, I saw those holding up and doing better, and we bought those and did really well with those. So if you’re not falling as fast, often times what that means is that, really, you’ve got this scenario where you’re holding on to some pieces that people are interested in, and they’re not willing to sell them right now, still went down, but not as fast as the market as a whole.
The other thing that I’ve noticed over time is that often times those pieces that don’t fall as much as the market, when there is a recovery will bounce back, if you look back to February, March of last year, that’s exactly what we did, identified those pieces that were falling last rotated into those, we did continue to fall less by a little bit. And then when the bounce came, we bounced harder, because again, there’s some interest in those particular security. So what’s what’s interesting, the market right now is this value category, we have three big value pieces in our portfolio. And the energy piece is one of the others, all of which outperformed the S&P 500 today. And what that tells you is that right now, the market is looking at this economic recovery. And they’re excited about these stocks that can do well if the vaccine comes out and works. And we can get this virus under control. And one of the big advantages, I mean, if you have a cruise line, you’ve been really struggling to get to get by.
So you’ve cut costs, you know, pretty dramatically, if you have an airline, you’ve cut costs. And if all of a sudden the virus is cured, and revenue shoots up in a in an environment where you’ve just cut a lot of costs, those companies profits could really skyrocket. And so that’s the rotation. This is an epic rotation. I’ve been doing this for 35 years. And I’ve never seen anything like this. But this is the first pandemic I’ve ever been involved in in that 35 year period. So that’s a good thing. So the advantage for me, so when I look at the downturns, and to me, this is a time to be calm, it’s not time to panic. This is a time to look, the market is talking to us. It is telling us information, I get more information out of days like today than I do out of days, like yesterday where the market was up a little bit. And so I can go in and see. And that’s what I’ll be working on, you know, this evening. What what worked, you know, where should we be, you know, what didn’t work? And does that continue to be a problem? And should we be rotating some pieces? So I apologize for the number of transactions that have been coming through, just recently, I really do. We don’t want to do them either. You know, we don’t make anything on them. At least there’s no commissions on them anymore. So that does help.
But this is a epic rotation that’s happening right now. Where we need to be able to see what’s happening, execute the plan, we’ve been executing the plan we are we’re in the right spot. The places that we left are doing worse than the places we’ve come into. And I think we’re setting ourselves up very well for some type of recovery. You know, the other part to keep calm about is that over the long term, the stock market goes up. Now it might go down more, you know in the short term here, especially when you have this kind of pain That’s happened, sometimes it does come down some more. But again, that’s just more information, more things that we can see. And better able to position ourselves for when there is a recovery, to create wealth. This is what we did over the last 12 months. And these types of downturns situation, we’re doing the right thing, we’re going the right direction, or making the right move so far, you know, that could change, we’ll see what’s happening, but I’m really very happy with the portfolio, we’ve been shrinking the amount of money in these growth type stocks, you know, I had five pieces, we got them down to two might go to zero, you know, because they’re still following, you know, there seems to be, I think all these Robinhood guys are running around right now trying to figure out what’s going on, you know, because most of them started investing about a year ago. And all of their experience has been up market and these growth stocks.
So, you know, this, this, this rotation is something that, you know, we’re seeing, we’re slightly ahead of it, you can see that, you know, we’re slightly ahead of what’s happening in that rotation. You know, I wish if I could go back in time, there’s all kinds of things that I would do differently. But I always like to say coulda, woulda, shoulda is undefeated, right? It is very difficult to, to really do. So I you know, don’t react to predictions, the market talks, it tells us things, it’s telling us what’s happening, listen to the market and look at that, and react. And don’t overreact. So I do what’s called incremental reaction. So, you know, I move a couple pieces and see what happens, you know, is it right or wrong? Okay, good. That was right. The other parts are still not doing well.
Okay, we have a couple more pieces. I don’t want to move like I have eight pieces of my, you know, model, I don’t move all eight at once, you know, on some prediction. So I’m listening to the market. And the market is telling us right now that there is a very, very strong rotation towards these value type of stocks, and a rotation out of these gross type of stocks. Now, how long does that last? What have you, but I think it’s going to continue for a while, just because, you know, the economy does seem to be recovering, we have another piece going on with the bond market, where you know, the rates are going up, because of this expected inflation from this explosive economic growth they might have. And that’s creating some problems for the bond market that you know, we have to kind of deal with separately, same thing, listen to the bond market. So bond markets telling us short term is better than longer term, the high yield stuff is doing, you know, medium altogether, we’ll see how that plays out. But that that process of you know where to go is the same on either market to just there’s lots of info that came out of, you know, what happened today.
So, I look at that as you know, an advantage. And, you know, I hate when the assets drop, we get paid based on the accounts. So we know we want them to go up every single day, but this is an opportunity. So let’s let’s take advantage of that. Let’s pay attention. Let’s listen. And let’s execute the plan, which is what we’ve been doing so far. So thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow. This is a very interesting timeframe to be to be listening. Thank you.