Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Wednesday, S&P 500 was down .08% today. Lots of things going on in the market, but they’re all essentially going sideways for the last couple days, we made several changes to the portfolios that I’d like to talk about today. I’ll save tomorrow for the specifics of exactly what we did.
Today, I’d like to kind of set the table and just talk about themes. One of my favorite things about investing is to essentially keep a big list of all the different themes that I see happening or might be happening in the future. And then to watch those and see which ones might be worth investing in. So a lot of times the themes that I have, I don’t really end up investing in maybe the too early like space exploration, it’s a great, interesting area. But it’s a little bit early for that right now. And you can really kind of see that in the charts. When you look at something like cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, it’s just too volatile as far as I’m concerned, too. So there are different things that make the cut that don’t, but I do need to see the trend working also.
So that theme and trend I’ve talked about many times in these videos, but I’ll give you kind of what’s happening right now and where we’re kind of expanding our offerings. So I had eight pieces in the models on my stock side. Now, I’ve been increase that to 15. And so I want to invest in another theme here. So the theme that we’ve been investing in quite heavily, and we’re really well positioned for, we’re still keeping all those positions, we’ve cut them down some so we can add these other pieces, but is the reopening theme.
And so the reopening thing, I think is just unbelievable all of this money that’s going to be coming out, and we’re seeing it, we’re seeing the earnings the restaurants, the rental car, company, semiconductors are going crazy the travel portion of it, the hotels, the consumer discretionary clothing stores and makeup stores, I mean, it’s just really, really going right now, banking does really well in this environment people take out more loans, and there’s when interest rates go up, that helps with their profitability and what have you too. So that that we’ve talked about, we still have that still love that I love all of the pieces in there, the transportation portion, all of it. Now what we have those another theme that’s really starting to run right now, that I think is worth looking at. And we’ve invested in some pieces in that theme.
And that’s really the government spending this particular administration is pushing money out, and they’ve got some very specific concept of where they’re trying to go with that money. And we’re starting to see some very strong motion in that area. So of course, the first one is infrastructure. And so at looking at what’s happening, I’m pretty convinced that something’s going to be spent in infrastructure. And really, it’s coming down to kind of two main areas, I call it traditional infrastructure.
So like utilities they improve the electric grid, you’ve got companies that are going to build the bridges and pave the road, you got companies are going to provide the materials for those, right. So this is what traditional infrastructure and man, those are really starting to move right now to which I’m very interested in. But then there’s the other portion, I call it the technology side of the infrastructure. So they’re going to roll out broadband to the rest of the country, in theory, they’re going to have technology built into these transportation systems, water delivery systems, and what have you.
So there are some Exchange Traded Funds that focus on kind of the technology side of infrastructural called Intelligent Infrastructure, really, really interesting area. We’re also seeing kind of under the guise of environmental, social governance to call ESG funds, those are doing really well, again, this particular administration is trying to push things towards that. And you would have all kinds of different areas there. But essentially, electric vehicles, charging stations would fit inside of that clean energy as a whole, I think is a really fascinating area right now. Now, clean energy actually dropped about 20, 30%, since middle of February, and now it’s time to start to accumulate those again.
So I think there’s some good, decent bargains inside of that, too, especially with the government pushing behind. And there’s one more area that’s very fascinating. And that’s area of cyber security. And I just keep reading about how much money is going to be spent both from the private sector and the public sector on trying to secure data. And it’s a massive undertaking to make sure we don’t have a big hack, like we did last year, again. And so what’s happening there is there’s a bunch of companies that should do quite well in that cybersecurity arena. That’s another area that you know, that we added to today also.
So that’s what’s happening, really fascinating. I think there’s some great themes that are out there right now that are worth looking at that I think have some legs might run for a while. And that’s what we’re kind of doing. We were also adding to the broad market pieces, because I’m starting to see just tons of money coming into the market actually. So I think that’s a great thing altogether, and we’re starting to see some some motion as a whole Kind of what we really wanted to have happen all year long and starting to really seems to be perking up right now. So we’ll see how that goes going forward. But look forward to talking to you tomorrow. We’ll talk about some more specifics with the portfolios, but thank you for listening.