Transcript
Well, everybody, welcome to Thursday, the S&P 500 was up .6%. Today, and the market is really being driven by the thought of a stimulus package, which seems to be getting closer. If it does get signed, expect the market to respond positively to that. Also, I’ve had a lot of false runs so far. So hopefully this one does get signed. For our portfolios, it was a bumper day today really innovative technology, clean energy, online retail, they’re all up over 1, up to 2.6% altogether. So really, really powerful day for the portfolios, people are still pouring money into, you know, the things that we own at this point in time. So I’m really excited about that.
Today, we hit an all time high on the S&P 500. This is seems like a great time for me to talk about what strategy you want to have for reacting to down markets. And so I want to continue a little bit of the process that I talked about yesterday. And let me start by sharing this one chart here. So this is the S&P 500. Each one of these boxes is one month, this goes back for 25 years. And so these lines you see here is what’s called a multiple regression channel, very, very much so upward over time. And you know, we’ve had a fantastic return on this 25 years, even though we’ve had three of the biggest downturns in history. This is 45% drop for the 2000 downturn, almost a 55% drop here for the you know, 2008 downturn and a 35% drop here. So the strategy for what you should do in a down market is something that I think is really important to have a defined concept for.
So first of all, one of the things that I’m a big proponent of is reacting instead of predicting. So in other words, if I could predict that the market was going to go down right here or right here, or what have you, I would be at I would make the most rate of return I possibly could, but predictions are normally wrong. And so I believe in reacting, so but in order to react, you need to let the market fall some. Because how can you tell that this is going to turn into a big one that could have turned into a big one it didn’t, that could have turned, it didn’t that one didn’t, this was down 20%, the end of 2018, that didn’t, and even this really didn’t turn into a big downturn in the end. And so you have to be able to let the market float downward for a while. So I usually use about 20%. Because that’s fairly normal, we see 20% drops on a relatively regular basis. And so you want to design your portfolio to be able to handle that 20% drop with no, you know, adjustments. And so somebody says to me, Hey, I’m willing to let it drop 10%. During that 20% drop, that’s usually about a 60% stock portfolio, because you lose on the stock, but the bonds go up and maybe you know, you end up being 10% down. Past that point, you might want to start to make some adjustments, but make them very small. So for example, when we got past 20%, here this year, we did want to adjust, we took 5% of the stock market out and bought 5% extended duration treasuries. And that worked pretty well, you know, treasuries went up like they were supposed to. And so again, if the market would have continued down further, you know, we would have continued to do little chunks into treasuries and other things that would fall slower or go up during this downturn.
But the other strategy very, very important is kind of that rotation of stocks. So finding those pieces that are falling slower than the market, and rotating into those and out of the pieces that are falling faster. So for here, this was advanced healthcare, consumer staples and technology, especially big technology companies. And then eventually, very shortly thereafter, was innovative technology companies, usually kind of smaller companies. And so that idea behind rotating, as I mentioned yesterday, if they’re falling slower, hopefully that continues after you buy them and you don’t fall as far and then even more hopeful is that they bounce harder. So I think the recovery is critical, because I have a saying that, you know, if I have a choice between two investments, one that loses 30%, but recovers and bounces back in just three months, and another one that loses 3%, right, but doesn’t recover for three years, I’ll take the -30 because time is money. And so the one thing we have to be a little bit careful about with a pure buy and hold concept all the way through, which is what a lot of people do advocate. And I basically advocate, I’ve hardly ever made any major changes to portfolios in my career. But I am aware of the Great Depression, which was, you know, a situation where the market dropped 86% and took 14 years to get back. We haven’t had that. We keep bailing ourselves out you know, like we did here, and certainly like we did here, with different, you know, stimulus packages and Fed money coming out.
But it could happen at some point in time. So you really don’t want to have some kind of strategy to slowly kind of work your way out, you know, over some period of time, so that you don’t have, you know, full exposure to the market. Most of my clients can’t afford to wait for the money to come back for 14 years. So that that portion of it, I think it’s important to have a plan. I think, you know, here we are at the all time high, I’m very positive about the possibilities for the market. I’m not trying to make any predictions, I don’t do that I react. And I think things are going great. But I do think it’s important for people to feel a sense of calm, knowing that there is some kind of a plan that you have, you know, if things do start to turn down again.
And so for the most part, we can just kind of kick back, let things happen, because at the moment, we’re really far away from a 20% downturn, the market is essentially going straight up at this point in time. So you know, we’ll see how long that goes. I do think the fundamentals are fantastic. I keep reading all kinds of great articles for what could happen next year. And I’m very excited about that. But always have a plan for how to deal with what might happen if the market doesn’t go the way that we think it does. So anyway, that would be my plan. That’s what’s worked this time, definitely, you know, small incremental changes only after about a 20% downturn. And then, you know, really focus on the recovery, find those stocks that fell less, etc. So, there’s, uh, you know, I think a menu of things here that could really help us going forward too. So, look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow, and I’ll talk to you then thank you very much.