Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
With the changing market, what are you investing in? Like with this current market?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, this current market, right now, I’m really looking strongly towards having a very, very diversified portfolio for starters. And because I think one of the things that that I find really fascinating is how sold people get on a certain path that might happen. We’re having inflation, I gotta buy gold to go do this and that. Okay, you know, that seems like a good path. That seems like a good probability. But there are more variables happening this year than in any other year I can ever remember, when you have the Federal Reserve getting this aggressive with their conversations. And their possible, you know, fighting inflation, you have this inflation, this I gotta reopen, you got a pandemic, you’ve got the possibility of another variant slowing things down, you’ve got an election. On top of that, you got supply chain constraint, I’ve never seen anything like this, you’ve got a whole workforce that shifted to a certain degree, we’ve have some of these shortages and labor, or because the massive retirements people have accelerated their retirements to three years in advance, these are all variables that, you know, you’re gonna have a really hard time figuring out the direction. And you might think, hey, financials, and these different things are the greatest thing since sliced bread. But we have 75% of our assets in the S&P 500. And the total stock market index, just because of the fact that I don’t know for sure where things are gonna go this year. So that’s number one. And so then, then the rest is decided on. Okay, what do we think might do? Well, I like semiconductors. You know, they haven’t outperformed so far this year. The index that I’m using right now is SOS exits iShares. Semiconductor ETF, I think it’s down about a percent more than the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index. It’s up today, up 2% Today, so maybe we’re catching up anyway.
And so, because semiconductors are pretty unique, everything agreed, it’s always a shortage, shortage, shortage shortage. And then Taiwan Semiconductor, you know, released their earnings. And they did fantastic, actually, in huge demand. And what a group right now, and it’s, it’s, it’s sort of isolated that you can’t open up a semiconductor company tomorrow, you know, and, and create competition. So they have trouble meeting the demand, I think that eventually, you know, worked its way out. But could be a good year for semiconductors, it was last year, I think that index was up something around 60% versus the market. So I like that category. I like something that has a lot of demand irregardless, it’s down a little bit more right now, because some of these companies have higher multiples, and there’s a shift towards the kind of value, but it keeps coming back, which I like, including today. I mean, the markets down today, and that’s up. So that’s good. That’s a good sign. I like Apple personally, it’s one of my other targets, I think, you know, better they had a good fourth quarter, I’d like to see what’s going to happen there. You know, they’re, they’re sort of all weathers stock, they’re selling it 30 times earnings, that’s pretty high, not as high as a lot of little stocks. But, you know, so they’re taking a little bit of a hit here with this, you know, flight to values flight to, you know, inflationary environment. But again, I think, you know, you just wait for them to churn out their earnings, and which had been pretty good. You know, and they have a nearly cult, like, following people buy Apple, you know, just because, and they come out with something new, they buy it, and they’re working on these new VR goggles, right, and they’ve got the Apple car out there, they’re buying back $90 billion worth of their shares, you know, this year, it’s just, I think it’s a great story. They have great cash, they’re not really reliant upon, you know, borrowing to run their business. So higher interest rates won’t affect that as much. So, you know, I think they’ve got some headwinds in front of them. But I like that company, I think that’s a good place to be personally. So, you know, the targets are pretty small and few in between right now, things that I just really kind of believe in.
Mostly, we’re staying very diversified. And I get I’ve been, that’s been my drumbeat for quite a while right now, I think you got to be really careful about getting too narrow here. You might look right for a while, but then all of a sudden, you know, inflation turns out to not be the big boogeyman people thought or what have you. There’s a lot that can happen. And I would be watching that supply chain issue. Because I think once that resolves, we will see you know, inflation moderate pretty rapidly and maybe even to the point where the Federal Reserve doesn’t have to do as much aggressive work against inflation is thought that would be great for companies as a whole. So if you’re on that inflationary side with all of your gold and all of these other value stocks that do Well in inflationary environment, so I don’t know where it’s going to go. And so I’m going to buy everything and let that go. And you know, VTI is down 2.7%. A lot of these targets, there’s some that have done better Mid Cap values, Small Cap value, Large Cap value generally has done better than VTI. But man, there’s a lot of pieces out there done a lot worse. So that’s where it’d be really hard as sort of a minefield, in my opinion, to get out there and try to figure out what’s going to do well.