Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
As an investor, like how do I like stay patient and calm with this volatile market? Because the last couple years are just been going up. And I look at my statement, and it’s always positive, but now we’re starting to see a little bit more red.
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, it’s gonna be hard, I’m noticing more angst within the clientele. Because, you know, again, you go back to 2018, I think the total stock market index was up about four or 5%. For the year, we had a 20% drop, you look at, you know, some of the some, there’s been a lot of years here that haven’t been that great. And you know, you kind of get used to that. But then you look at 2019, you look at 2020, we had a big drop, but the total market was up a lot. You look at 2021. And so it’s been a long time, people been getting statements that look good month after month after month. And you know, I always thought it was kind of chuckle on myself when somebody asked me oh, you know, and it was like a 2%. downline to say, Wow, that’s wait until we really get a big one. So now we’re getting a bigger one. And this is going to get worse before it gets better. I have no problem thinking about that. There’s a lot of downward momentum right now, we’ve been seeing the market fall apart on two different days, you know, Wednesday and Thursday of this week, where it was up and then reversed. And in fact, the NASDAQ reversed over 1%, which it hasn’t really done in 20 years. And so you know, there’s, there’s some things happening as far as that goes. But the way to stay calm during this particular thing is to first of all, that’s where the education comes in. It’s why we have this show. It’s why we put out these videos, I stay calm, because I know a lot about the different history of what’s going on. So giving example, you know, on average, after the first interest rate increase, which probably is going to happen in March, the stock market drops 6% on the S&P 500. But six months later, it’s actually at 5% in total. And so, on average, the stock market makes 10.4% In a year, following a year that made over 28, that’s last year made over 20. And so on average, the stock market follows earnings, right, earnings are up 8.5%, at 1% of companies reporting so far have beaten expectations.
And this will be the seventh quarter in a row beating expectations, the leading economic indicator is up, not down not peeking up in December, could come down, but it’s not happening right now. And in reality, interest rates are zero, they’re gonna raise them, they’re gonna cut back on bond purchases, they’re gonna do all these things. That will definitely slow things down and certainly impact demand. But so that I mean, here’s some more I mean, inflation is being caused by demand, which they’re going to work on with the Federal Reserve, but it’s also been caused by supply chain constraints, what happens is supply chain constraints get better. And I think there’s a very good probability that they do throughout the end of the year here, we’ll probably see supply that’s going to help inflation right there allow the Federal Reserve to lower rates left, less, inflation could be a lot less and second half of this year. Look at what happens in an average midterm year going back to the 19. You know, 20s, basically, the first part of the year is usually poor. Second part of the year is quite good. So again, if that’s true, you want to do opposition rebalancing. So what can you do to take advantage, but a lot of it’s just kind of understanding, you know, what, what’s out there, what’s happened. That’s why we do this show. That’s exactly why I do the show. And because, you know, negative news sells, if you look at what’s out there, and I’ve said this before, it’s one of the reasons we do concentrate somewhat on the positive just as an offset. negative news is what gets clicks, you know, we’d get a lot more views, I mean, a lot more like, like a magnitude more, if this show was negative, if we talked about why the stock market was gonna drop 30%. And there’s so many of those guys out there, they’re all over the place. You know, we’re gonna have the greatest stock market crash in history coming up right now, you know, that kind of stuff, lots of clicks. So, I think one of the ways to kind of help yourself in terms of your, your feeling of angst, watch our show.
Because we’re gonna bring you some of the positive pieces. And these are facts, I’ll tell you when it’s negative, I’ll tell you, when the leading indicators going down, I’ll tell you when the 200 day moving average is going down, you know, those types of things, but those aren’t happening right now. So this is, you know, until they do start to happen at this point in time, in my opinion, we’re in what I call a sideways motion market. Again, that doesn’t mean it won’t go down, you know, might even go down 20% But we’re still kind of in that trending, you know, motion that trend was going up. And now that stopped and now we’re gonna go kind of sideways and get really you know, volatile which is happening, and then we’ll either re establish an uptrend, you know, we’ll have a strategy for that or will actually fall into a full on downtrend. And we have strategy for that. But, you know, have strategies, that would be another thing. I think that helps, right? Have some plans, what are you going to do? I have plans at pas, I have plans for every path that I can think of all the time, I’d love doing that. And that helps me i i Look at downturns this opportunity. So that’s another thing that I think helps with, you know, the feelings of angst that you might get, right.
Easan Arulanantham:
Yeah, and just from a planning perspective, or whenever we run a plan, we account for markets having downturns. We don’t, we don’t account for markets always going up. We, you know, when we run our MonteCarlo, there’s times when, you know, the market drops a lot. And we have that. And so as long as you have a good plan, you can weather the storm, and you should be Wait, you can come if you have a plan, you know what you can handle?
Tom Vaughan:
That’s a great point, right? I mean, think about it, the market, I think is down, we just looked at just you and I before the show started, from the very high point that the S&P 500 to the point it was at, when we were looking at it was down, you know, roughly 9%, right. And people are going to be concerned and because we’re so used to the upturn, especially right, so we’re gonna, that that statement that comes out at the end of January, people are gonna be like, Whoa, you know, and, but that is part of the financial plan, the financial plan allows, you know, runs 1000 times through your scenario. And it allows the computer to randomly choose amongst all of these variables, including the stock market. And so some of those situations are pretty bad stock markets. And so then you can look at your probability of success. So what is my probability success? Let’s say it’s 95%. What happens now? Okay, hey, I just had a 9% downturn in the S&P 500. I can run that Monte Carlo simulation again. Oh, look, I’m at 93%. That’s still really good. You know, I wouldn’t worry about it that much, until it got down to the 75% level or less, to be honest. And a lot of people are at 99. And they’re just pegged up there. And even with this type of downturn, there is no change at all. So that does it puts a more longer term perspective into the situation by looking at your financial plan, and seeing, you know, because that’s the ultimate, right? I mean, it’s not how much your accounts are worth. It’s what’s going to happen to your retirement. Right. Whether you’re retired or not, you know, what’s going to happen to your retirement.