Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
Do you believe we’ve seen the bottom in June or this is just another bear market rally waiting for another downturn?
Tom Vaughan:
Ah, let me get my crystal ball in a polish it up here really good. I think one of the biggest fallacies that happens in investing, which is just simply this concept of you have to know where things are gonna go. And, really, over the course of time, especially in short term moves, like we’re talking about here, people don’t know where the market is gonna go. And, and I don’t really know where the market is going to go to. I do know, certain things that I’m looking for if we break below this support level that we’re at right now, which we’re bouncing off of very nicely, but if we break below that, it’s very likely that we’re going to skip down into a new low. I would want to get a bit more conservative if we break through this. If on the other hand we break above the resistance that’s above us and eventually break through the tuner day moving average and and break through this downtrend line that we’ve had here in this downturn, we could be off and running. We’re actually at this kind of precipice right now, where things could go either way, I could make pretty strong arguments that the market is going to go up from here, I can also make strong arguments, the markets gonna go down from here, and I’m very, very happy to be sitting with 18% less exposure to the stock market, in this environment, still have plenty of exposure might reduce that exposure or increase it depending on what happens. But I’d look at it more from a reactionary standpoint. I guess if I tallied up all of the pieces from going higher or lower, you make a decent argument that it could go lower. But boy, have I ever seen stock markets bounce out of that scenario? You really can’t keep a tally. I mean, in 2008, downturn, the bottom was, I think it was March 9 of 2009.
I remember March of 2009. Very specifically, it was very dark. There wasn’t anybody touting in the market had just fallen about 30 More percent, and it collapsed. And it was ugly, and the market turned around at that point. So you just, that’s not uncommon, when you go back to look at the bottoms of these big bear markets, they can happen in a time of darkness. That’s why you gotta be really careful, again, the markets looking forward six to 18 months, are things gonna be better six to 18 months from now I can make a great argument that they are, inflation comes down. I mean, one of the things I heard on Bloomberg Radio, I mentioned this last week, but I still think it’s kind of fascinating. 1981 is the last big spike in interest, inflation, we had huge movements in the Federal Reserve’s trying to kill inflation, the Fed rate came up tremendously, that in 1982 and 10 months in 1982, once they got inflation under control, the S&P 500 went up 106%. Historically, when we hit peak inflation, which we at least at the moment, the peak was in July, sorry, June, July was lower, maybe August is going to be lower. And the markets go up past peak inflation overall, right. So I think it’s a little bit questionable whether we actually hit peak inflation, because we did have some false moves in the 70s, where look like inflation was coming down, and then it really spiked, right. So that’s why the Federal Reserve keeps talking about the 70s, we’ve got to stay vigilant, we got to keep raising rates and keep doing these things. And we got to make sure that we drive the market down I mean, sorry, the inflation down, that could drive the market down, too.
I think this is a period in time, where you just have to watch and be careful, stay widely diversified. And have a little bit of a parachute – in our case, T bills and ultra short term bonds, but because the market could get down from here, but it could, it could go straight up. So, I don’t know, I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t even want to guess I never do that. There’s projections, and there’s reaction. And I think people that are constantly I hear that all the time, oh, this is going to happen. I mean, we’ve had questions on the show. Oh, I gotta buy gold. Okay, well, actually, it’s not that great, right? I mean, they’re buying it at the high, because this high inflationary timeframe, you gotta buy materials, not so much didn’t work very well. Because that’s a projection. This is what’s going to happen. I’d rather see some proof. I’d like to see some movement. I want to buy into that movement. I want to buy that momentum and then when that momentum stops, I’m going to get out. I don’t really care. I supposed to do that or not you buy the price, it’s all in the price, right? The information is in the price. And a lot of people lose a lot of money based on trying to do projections, we do a little, I mean, we bought short term tips because of a projection that I had, that inflation was going to come up. Worked out, okay did better than the overall bond market. But for every one of those you get, there’s a lot of them that don’t work either. So just reactions to what’s going on is more important, watching for things to break out, looking for that momentum. buying into those things, waiting till the momentum stops, and getting out has been a strategy that’s worked for me.
Easan Arulanantham:
Do you miss out on anything by jumping into like a trend into like the middle, so like, not at the very start of the trend, but a couple maybe a week or two into the trend or a little bit into the trend? Do you miss out on much of the returns in the long?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, you can actually and that’s one of the tricks of the whole thing is –because you can’t tell a trend has started at the bottom –right now there are some strategies, sometimes we’ll look at like the relative strength index on a 26 base 26 day basis, when that gets really stretched and gets below 30. That’s what happened in 2008, for example, 2000 2018, there were some periods where you could buy based on that stretch, and you would hit very close to the bottom. So that’s one of the things we look for in terms of true trend watching looking at breakouts, you’re usually a little bit later in the cycle. So then it’s a matter of how much can it run? So you want to look at that what’s the resistance above that? And say, Okay, I’m buying here, how high can it go? On a likely basis and what’s my risk for that? It’s all part of the calculation but yes, you definitely miss some when you’re doing momentum. Hopefully most of your assets are buying holds, you’re already in there. We’re just talking kind of on the margins here.