Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
I inherited some money, and I want to invest, you know, what are some of my best bets in the stock market right now?
Tom Vaughan:
Okay. Well, obviously, it would help to know, ages and risk tolerance and kind of you know what, what people are looking at. But just in terms of generic category that I would be looking at right now. My favorite category is semiconductor stocks at this point in time. And you can buy individual stocks like AMD and Nvidia and Marvel and Broadcom and you know, these different things. Or you can buy an index, like the iShares semiconductor ETF, which is a symbol, so x x, which is what we’re using right now. And the reason I like semiconductors. First of all, they’re down more than the market still, right now, even though they’ve had a big run in the last couple of weeks, they’re still off, you know, almost twice as much as the S&P 500. So I think there’s some bargain, you know, potential there. But more importantly, is just, the demand picture for semiconductors is really unbelievable, when you really read into what’s going on, the world is digitizing at a very fast rate requiring more and more semiconductors, there’s only so many companies actually very difficult, you know, high end labor, big, really high end plants with clean rooms, in some cases, and those types of things, to really make these things. And so, you know, what we’ve read so far, for example, is that the semiconductors, companies, for example, for 2022, have already sold out all of their capacity that they can make, if they could make more, they’d make more, that’s a pretty good business, to me. And I know semiconductors have a boom and bust cycle, over the years, I just think in this particular environment, we’re going to see a long boom, in this scenario, and I think there’s some really exciting things going on with with AI autonomous driving. And you know, all of these different, you know, the Internet of Things, everything is needing, of course, cars are ramping up I, I’ve seen, I think 10 years ago, cars, roughly 30 semiconductors, now it’s almost 300 per car on average of making that up. And something along those lines, it was pretty dramatic, a chart that I saw some years ago. So I like that category, I think that there’s some value there, you know, some of the companies are a little overpriced, and some of them are under priced. And you know, there’s different things that are going on. But if I had an inheritance and was going to buy something, that’s what that’s what I would do.
Easan Arulanantham:
And for me, it really depends on your entire portfolio. Because like usually for, you know, these kind of like more targeted things, they should be a smaller portion of your portfolio. And so and you also have to be actively managing, if I if I was doing it, and I just wanted something that was super simple, and I could just kind of sit on it. You know, I think about just some very basic, like market indexes, you know, your VTI is every hose. And something that, you know, if you just stick with it, you’re not going to pay a lot of expenses with it. And it tends to go with the market and you’re kind of just wanting your stuff to grow without really putting that you don’t really have to dive into investing as much.
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, VTI, the Vanguard Total Stock market index ETF is got, I think it’s the most US stocks in any ETF that I can find over 4000 stocks. So it really encompasses every thing. I mean, it’s an incredible index to own just because no matter where the money goes, you know, Large Cap Mid Cap, Small Cap micro cap, growth value technology, so I can die, it’s in there. Now it’s market cap weighted, so the bigger companies are going to have a bigger impact. But that’s still a pretty, pretty nice ETF. And then Vo is the Vanguard S&P 500 index, you know, so it’s just replicating and buying the index, the S&P 500, very low expenses. And the S&P 500 is my favorite index of the big ones to follow and watch for a variety of reasons. But one of the things that I think happens here is that it’s very popular around the world. And by US stocks, I’m gonna buy the S&P 500 because the Standard and Poor’s has kind of put a quality screen on those, you know, they choose those 500. So it’s not just any company that’s in there, they have to have a certain amount of earnings and you know, what have you to so there’s like a committee picking that they take some off every year and put some on, you know, that’s going on. And I think you’d get a nice diversification of a lot of different industries and a lot of different exposures, mainly, mainly just large and some Mid Cap in that index. But yeah, those are those are really Good indexes to own long term I think you do quite well